Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy 9781503600843

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M A K ING MODER AT E ISL A M

John L. Jackson Jr., David Kyuman Kim, Editors

M A K ING MODER AT E ISL A M SUF IS M , S E R V IC E , AND T HE “ GRO UND Z E R O M O S Q U E ” C O NT R OVER SY

RO SEM A R Y R. CORBE T T

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS  •  STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Corbett, Rosemary R., author. Title: Making moderate Islam : Sufism, service, and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy / Rosemary R. Corbett. Other titles: RaceReligion. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: RaceReligion | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027701 (print) | LCCN 2016029125 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804791281 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503600812 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503600843 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Sufism--United States. | Islam and politics--United States. | Sufis--New York (State)--New York. | Mosques--New York (State)--New York. | Voluntarism--Religious aspects--Islam. | Muslims--Cultural assimilation--United States. Classification: LCC BP188.8.U6 C67 2016 (print) | LCC BP188.8.U6 (ebook) | DDC 297.09747/109051--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027701 Cover design: Matt Tanner Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

For Tariq Towe, with gratitude.

CO NTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: Debating Moderate Islam

ix 1

1 Islamic Traditions and Conservative Liberalisms

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2 Service, Anti-Socialism, and Contests to Represent American Muslims

41

3 Sufism and the Moderate Islam of the New Millennium

69

4 From Sufism without Politics to Politics without Sufism

93

5 The Micro-Politics of Moderation

125

6 The Prophet’s Feminism: Women’s Labor and Women’s Leadership

155

7 Islam in the Age of Obama: What’s More American than Service?

183

Conclusion: Community Service and the Limits of Inclusion

205

Notes

211

Bibliography

257

Index

277

ACKNOWLEDGM E NTS

While the lives of all books are many, this one has perhaps had more lives than most have prior to publication. What began as research in the years after 9/11— my first visit to New York City occurred as the fires still burned at Ground Zero, in a neighborhood that I now see daily from my window—changed greatly after May of 2010. That is the month I finished the first draft of my manuscript. It is also the month that members of the community with whom I had spent six years came under international scrutiny for trying to open an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan. It quickly became clear that the project I had spent so many years on suddenly needed to be almost entirely rewritten. And it took several years and drafts after that to feel I really understood the new story I now needed to tell. The debts incurred while undertaking such a project are numerous, to say the least. First and foremost, of course, I am deeply obliged to the members of the Masjid al-Farah community (and to the different Sufi groups affiliated with it) with whom I spent so many years. Several community members gave me not only their time but also their trust at a terrible moment in the history of our city and of our nation, when Muslim Americans had many reasons not to trust strangers who showed up with questions. Others gave me more than that: their friendship. Particularly to those with whom I shared countless hours and heartfelt, sometimes heart-rending, conversations, I wish I could thank you by name here. You may find yourself represented in the pages of this book—and I hope you do find yourself here, even though this is not the book you would have written or the way you would have written it—but I have ascribed pseudonyms to almost all of you for the sake of protecting your privacy, and possibly even safety, after all that has happened since 2010. I must also express my endless gratitude to those who have patiently watched this project develop through its various incarnations—some of whom

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toiled through far too many pages during that process. My largest debt is to Courtney Bender, who has read pieces of it at every stage and whose counsel, critiques, and friendship have been invaluable. Secondly, I owe deep gratitude to Randall Balmer, who encouraged me to undertake this project when he probably suspected that, as an Americanist, pursuing it well would turn out to be a more Herculean task than I had imagined. To Lila Abu-Lughod—particularly, but not exclusively, as the director of graduate studies at the Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender—I also owe many thanks for years of encouragement, support, and mentorship. And to Richard Bulliet I owe my knowledge not just of Islamic history but of the history of continual interactions between peoples over the millennia—Muslims, Jews, and Christians in, across, and through the regions now often talked about as “North” and “South,” “East” and “West.” Also, to Elizabeth Castelli I owe thanks for wading through that first iteration and, more recently, for helping me find a way to use the knowledge I gained during my research in the service of more direct and tangible good. All royalties from this book will go to the organization she introduced me to, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Founded in 1966 to help secure civil rights for black Americans, CCR is now at the forefront of defending the rights of Muslim New Yorkers—American-born and immigrant, black and Latino, Arab and South Asian—among others, even as it continues to fight for equal justice for black Americans and immigrants more broadly. I cannot sufficiently express my thanks to the dear friends who have seen me through the many years of research and beyond. Erika Dyson, Jodi EichlerLevine, Julia Cato, Lisa Uperesa, Heather Schwartz, Abigail Kluchin, and ­Daniel Vaca: we are now scattered across the continents (and islands, Lisa!), but you are still as close to my heart as when we all toiled in that one little corner of Manhattan. To Caitlin Cox and James Hare, Mandy van Deven and Joel Bourdeaux, Afua Brown and Nathan Larsen: I am so thankful you’ve stayed in New York, where you keep me both honest and sane. Other generous, creative, and brilliant colleagues and friends have come from the world beyond New York, and these include my two co-organizers of our years-long “Islam in/and America” collective, Juliane Hammer and Zareena Grewal—Juliane, thank you for starting us off at Princeton so many years ago and for your gracious friendship ever since—as well as Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Zain Abdullah, Hisham Aidi, Zaheer Ali, Moustafa Bayoumi, Sylvia Chan Malik, Edward Curtis, Sohail Daulatzai, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Sally Howell, Sajida Jalalzai (also a Columbian!), Debra Majeed, Tim Marr, Hussein



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Rashid, and Nayan Shah, many of whom have also encouraged me in or collaborated with me on other projects. My thanks also to Ruth Mas, with whom I’ve cooperated in many ventures (and commiserated over some), and who has a mind and a level of fortitude that will forever inspire me, as well as a generous spirit. Additionally, I must thank those who encouraged this research along the way by not only discussing it with me but also publishing various drafts of it. These people include Aminah Beverly McCloud, Markus Dressler, and Finbarr Curtis. I would be more than remiss not to recognize the friends and colleagues who supported my work and my efforts to find my way during the two years I spent as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. My thanks to Jonathan Wilson, the director there, for so many things—among them an open door, an open heart, and an incredible wit—and to Susannah Heschel for getting me to Tufts in the first place. Also, to K ­ halilah Tyre, Jennifer London (who often lent me a couch and a shoulder), Sasha ­Senderovich, Amahl Bishara, and, especially, Heather Curtis—friends and colleagues but also amazing people (and, in Heather’s case, an indefatigable letter writer!) I must also express my deep thanks to the colleagues and mentors I had during my fellowship as a 2013–2015 Young Scholar in American Religion: Courtney Bender and Bob Orsi, who made us work hard and made it all worth it, and the lovely and ingenious members of my cohort—of whom I will always be in awe and will always consider friends—Shelby Balik, Omri Elisha, Alison Greene, Kathleen Holscher, Hillary Kaell, David King, Anthony Petro, Josef Sorret, and John Stipes. We would not have been able to do any of the things we did together without the dedicated support and guidance of Phil Goff and Becky Vasko, for whom I am also most grateful. I received funding for this research and assistance with it at various stages and owe recognition to Columbia University for several years of Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, as well as to the Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy for my years there as a Mellon Graduate Fellow (a position that came with funding that paid for interview transcriptions, as well as with the invaluable mentorship of the incomparable William McAlister). The American Association of University Women gave me a grant to help with the first iteration of this project, and Columbia University’s Middle East Institute (now MESAS) provided me with transcripts of interviews undertaken as part of the Muslims in New York Project (1997– 2003, portions of which are cited in Chapter 5 of this book), as well as sent me

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on what seemed likely to be a fool’s errand but proved to be an unforgettable ethnographic experience: commenting on Fox News in an attempt to quell the hysteria over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy. The process of turning a manuscript into a book can be quite fraught in the most ordinary of cases. For their guidance in this process, I must thank EmilyJane Cohen, my editor at Stanford University Press; Angela Roskop Erisman, a diligent copy editor who saved me from many embarrassing mistakes; and David Kyuman Kim and John Jackson, editors of the series in which this book appears. I owe a particular debt to David, who not only recruited my book for the series and advised at every step along the way but also became a great friend in the meantime. Additionally, I owe thanks to Judith Weisenfeld, for many things, really—most specifically here for providing a listening ear and sage words since the moment I first sought publication of my manuscript. There are some friends, family, and co-conspirators who don’t fit in the list of usual suspects but who deserve recognition for their many years of support. For me, these include Jodi Pratt (my yidishe mame, who has shared so much with me over the decades—including her own experience of escaping the burning towers on 9/11) and the late Thomas Deloy Pratt (my earliest mentor), Gary Adler (who sometimes housed me during my itinerant years in Berkeley and convinced me, for better or worse, that I wanted to pursue a doctoral degree), Teresa Williams Hooker, Jennifer Floyd Larson, Megan Roberts Hearne, ­Rachel Brown, Anna Kang (fast friends with whom I’ve shared two decades of personal and professional ups, downs, and existential questions), Michael J. Stolper (who provided invaluable support for years and was remarkably good about educating an overly bookish roommate in all manner of pop culture trivia), and Till Bender (who shared international perspectives on America and American Studies, as well as allowed me to karmically return the favor of lending someone a couch on occasion). Other mentors who fit between friends and family have given more than what’s required and then some; these include Marian Ronan, David Watt (my intellectual grandfather in that academic lineage kind of way), and Laura ­Levitt. And my own family deserves recognition for their years of encouragement despite the fact that they did not necessarily know why I was working so hard for so long or where I was going with it. To Renette Melander, Robert Corbett, Janette Corbett, Mark Corbett, and Christie Corbett, I owe you endless love. To Kevin Barrie and Richard Woods, I also owe you a room at the inn any time you want it!



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Finally, my greatest thanks go to the two people who have read this current version of my work more closely than any others. First, to Rhea Rahman, who saved my sanity not only by formatting my footnotes and joining me in rants about all nature of injustice in the world—challenging me to think longer and harder at many points along the way—but who also, along with Annie ­Erkkinen, gave my little girl more devoted attention than I could have asked for in those moments when I couldn’t. Finally, there are no words capacious enough to capture my debt to David Kaiser, the most devoted partner, co-parent, and line editor I could ever ask for. You’ve encouraged me in ways too myriad to mention and waded through some turgid prose in the meantime. Without you, this book would not be what it is.

M A K ING MODER AT E ISL A M

INTRO DUCTI ON Debating Moderate Islam

I N D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9,

Feisal Abdul Rauf announced plans to open a t­hirteen-story Islamic community center in Manhattan. A prominent imam, Sufi shaykh, and the internationally recognized leader of the Cordoba Initiative (founded in 2004 to “heal” the divide between “Islam and the West”1), Rauf designed Cordoba House to educate Americans about the truths Islam shares with other faiths and to exemplify the “moderate Islam” he had spent nearly a decade promoting, most notably in his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam.2 There, in Friday messages he had delivered at his mosque since 2001 and in public appearances sponsored by the US State Department, among others, Rauf defined Muslim moderation by translating Islamic traditions into American idioms. His primary message: Islam is part of an ethical tradition originating with Abraham (the biblical patriarch common to Judaism and Christianity) and, of all the governments in the world, American liberal democracy best embodies this ethic in social form. Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic—an ethic, he argues, that also characterized Cordoba, the multi-religious city of twelfth-­century Spain—Rauf understands US laws and institutions to comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah).3 Consequently, non-Muslim Americans can accept Muslims as Abrahamic siblings, while Muslim Americans can promote American liberal values and social systems worldwide. Both local leaders and international elites, ranging from Rauf ’s World Economic Forum colleagues to the Archbishop of Canterbury, widely praised

2

INTRODUCTION

Rauf ’s message of Abrahamic commonality after 9/11. Consequently, the imam did not expect significant opposition to Cordoba House. Indeed, many religious, political, and financial leaders responded positively to the project, and a Manhattan community board gave its approval. Others, however—especially politicians practiced in using fear of Islam for electoral gain—denounced the center as a “Ground Zero Mosque,” turning it and Rauf ’s claims of moderation into subjects of international debate. The controversy intensified in the summer of 2010. While Rauf was on a cultural outreach tour sponsored by the State Department, Republican Congressman Peter King claimed Rauf only posed as a moderate and should be investigated for ties to radical Islam.4 King was not the first public official to castigate the imam this way; he followed both Tea Party leader Mark Williams and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives who was then an aspiring presidential candidate. Casting aspersion on the center, Gingrich argued that the medieval city of Cordoba signified not interreligious coexistence but Islamic conquest over a Christian kingdom—something, he claimed, Muslims sought to repeat in the United States.5 Such accusations prompted Sharif El-Gamal, the project’s developer and one of Rauf ’s Sufi dervishes, to rename the proposed community center after its street address: “Park51.” Still, Gingrich likened building Cordoba House to placing Nazi signs near Holocaust memorials or to erecting a Japanese cultural center near Pearl Harbor.6 Rauf, Daisy Khan (his wife and Cordoba House codirector, who cofounded and led other organizations with Rauf), and several commentators, including The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, responded to such hyperbole by comparing the situation of contemporary Muslim Americans to that of Catholic and Jewish Americans during the early twentieth century.7 Reiterating one of his constant themes, Rauf described overcoming nativist discrimination in the United States as part of the general “immigrant religious experience”—a sociological process Catholics and Jews had completed, providing Muslims with a template for how to successfully Americanize while retaining core tenets of faith.8 Indeed, Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities did face tremendous discrimination and opposition a century ago, some of which has abated over time. As I discuss in the following chapters, however, Rauf ’s optimistic appeals to history and attempts to render Islamic traditions familiar to non-Muslims replicated and obscured some of the ways earlier marginalized religious groups learned to claim belonging in the United States—ways that invariably involved



DEBATING MODERATE ISLAM 

3

contrasting their own marginalized traditions with those of even less accepted populations, such as black Americans.9 Failing to recognize this dynamic, Rauf also failed to fully appreciate the political, economic, and racial positioning involved in his claims of moderation. The story of assimilation, upward mobility, and moderation Rauf told before the Cordoba House controversy repeated a narrative created by earlier immigrants who emphasized the same ethics (including work ethics) as dominant white Protestants, as well as the moral obligation to engage in community service in order to assist those who fail to succeed in America’s free-market system. As we shall see, this narrative has deeply racist roots and ramifications. It helped earlier generations of immigrants and marginalized religious and racial groups to prove their loyalties when they were suspected of having uncivilized mores or Communist sympathies, but it also perpetuated the fiction that “white” Americans (whoever is included in that category at any particular period of time) have experienced upward mobility because of their own efforts in a meritocracy, rather than because of the social capital connected to whiteness in the United States and because of the twentieth-century governmentfunded social welfare programs that aided whites and white ethnics but largely excluded nonwhites.10 In short, this argument has served, among other things, as a way for marginalized groups to distinguish their communities from dispossessed black Americans and other so-called undeserving poor—or, in the case of black Americans like W. D. Mohammed (leader of the former Nation of Islam), to distinguish themselves from the ostensibly underserving poor in their midst. Not surprisingly, although many saw Rauf ’s message of American Abrahamic exceptionalism as quintessentially moderate, others—including some Muslim Americans—could not agree with it. Rauf did not personally hold to the racist beliefs this older narrative perpetuates, nor did he even recognize that it perpetuates them. Still, he began to tell a somewhat different story after the Cordoba House controversy, in part because the controversy coincided with a recession so severe it made painfully apparent many of the economic and racial inequalities built into neoliberal free-market capitalism in the United States. Other aspects of Rauf ’s work also changed after that, including his public emphasis on combatting Muslim-led terrorism with Sufism, a body of tradition that involves not just the five daily prayers and other required Islamic practices but additional formal reflection and observance (dhikr). The idea that Sufism is the opposite of dogmatic (some would say “fundamentalist”11) Islam is as old as the idea that the United States

4

INTRODUCTION

is a true meritocracy—that is to say, it is relatively recent. Both popular and newly politicized for domestic and international purposes, this discourse of Sufi moderation is also one with racist roots and ramifications that were unapparent to Rauf when he echoed it. For over a century, Americans—following the work of British and German idealists and orientalists, among others—saw the mystical habits of some “Aryan” (Indian and Persian) Sufi orders (or tariqas, which can be Sunni, Shi‘a, or a mix of both) as a welcome contrast to what they believed were the rigid attitudes of “Semites” (Jews and, more to the point here, Arabs—­especially Arab Muslims). After the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis in the late 1970s, Persians/Iranians were no longer regarded in the United States as moderate counterweights to ostensibly rigid Arabs.12 Nevertheless, in the eyes of many, Sufism retained its claim to being the practice of less doctrinaire—or less “fundamentalist”—Muslims. While this history continues to inform contemporary notions of Sufism as moderate Islam, it is reliant on such superficial and racializing generalities that few people would make the argument that Sufis are relatively moderate Muslims in the same terms today. Rauf has always been happy to receive any goodwill directed toward Sufis, but he does not engage this history in his writings. Instead, he presents religious moderation as a cultural issue (one with political and economic aspects), not a racial one. It is quickly apparent in Rauf ’s work, however—particularly in the 2004 book that helped make him famous—that the moderate Islam he promotes is and will be the province of more affluent Muslims. Generally, in the United States, this means Arab and South Asian immigrants rather than black Americans. Thus, while Rauf does not replicate the explicitly orientalist racial framework tied up with assumptions about Sufi moderation, his particular promotion of Sufism and community service— merged, as it is, with an economic philosophy that ignores ongoing issues of racially differential treatment in this country—give this older orientalist narrative new racial ramifications. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, Sufism and community service within a neoliberal market society are essential elements in Rauf ’s definition of moderation. This is despite the fact that Rauf and Khan deemphasized Sufism in 2006, when Rauf began building a reputation as an international expert on Islamic law and participating in State Department outreach programs in Muslim majority regions where Sufism is often viewed with suspicion. Only after the Cordoba House controversy—during which it became apparent that many



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Americans still see “Sufism” as synonymous with “moderate Islam”—did they began to emphasize Sufism again. While Rauf and Khan made these changes strategically, they also made them quite sincerely. Sufism and service (which Rauf often connects to Sufism) are what bring Islam to life for them. They are also practices that bring people together despite a multitude of differences. When Rauf and Khan deemphasized Sufism, it was not simply because they no longer saw it as politically expedient, but because they no longer saw it as essential to achieving some of the other goals they had formed after 9/11, including that of gaining for Muslims worldwide the kind of acceptance, freedom, and prosperity they enjoyed in the United States. The following account of their work and institutions is not intended as an exposé. Rather, it is a look at the history and present of ideas that inform the concept of “moderation” and an examination of some of the political, economic, racial, and gendered ramifications of living Islam in the ways now demanded of Muslim Americans.

Defining and Defending American Muslim Moderation: A Method to the Madness Although Rauf was new to the role of spokesperson for moderate Muslims after 9/11, his institutional and public leadership began long before he founded the Cordoba Initiative. When, six months after the attacks, a PBS reporter asked Rauf to explain “the key things” Islam, Christianity, and Judaism share, Rauf was serving in his nineteenth year as the imam of Masjid al-Farah in Lower Manhattan. He was also in his fifth year as the shaykh of a related Sufi group and as CEO of the American Sufi Muslim Association (or ASMA Society), which he cofounded with Khan in 1997 to promote tasawwuf (Arabic for “Sufism”) as authentic Islam. Although formally educated in physics rather than Islamic theology and as likely to draw income from his work in real estate as his work in religion, the fifty-four-year-old Egyptian American was also a trustee of the city’s Islamic Cultural Center, an advisor to the Interfaith Center of New York, and the author of two books on Islamic practice in America. For some time, Rauf had planned to write a third book on Sufi dhikr. In response to events following the 9/11 attacks, however, he changed course.13 Rather than discuss Sufism in the PBS interview, Rauf described the ASMA Society as a specifically “non-political, educational and cultural” organization designed to improve relations “between the American public and American

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INTRODUCTION

Muslims.”14 He responded to the reporter’s question about commonality by outlining the main aspects of Abrahamic cohesion: a common ancestor, common monotheistic beliefs, and common ethics.15 This subject, instead of his intended treatise on Sufism, comprised the substance of his next book, in which he also described the immigrant process of gaining acceptance as one that involved acculturating by embracing free-market capitalism and creating organizations to contribute to society through various kinds of service. The following year, Rauf and Khan (then ASMA’s executive director), hosted an event to advance their vision of Abrahamic unity at St. Bartholomew’s Church, an influential religious and cultural institution on Park Avenue where Rauf taught classes on Sufism. On a Sunday evening that June, well-heeled New Yorkers assembled to break bread together and watch a dramatic rendering of interreligious cooperation and progress. The Cordoba Bread Fest focused on the harmonious history and spirit of twelfth-century al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) that Rauf and Khan hoped to inculcate in the United States through the ASMA Society and also to disseminate worldwide.16 Enjoying broad institutional and financial support (a host of religious, cultural, political, and financial luminaries gathered for the event), the Cordoba Bread Fest also served as a public platform for promoting their newest venture, the Cordoba Initiative.17 In contrast to ASMA’s domestic educational and cultural work, the Cordoba Initiative was designed to be an international policy-oriented organization that would, among other things, show how American Muslims could encourage Muslims elsewhere to overcome fundamentalism by adopting the “shariahcompliant” American frameworks that (according to Rauf) foster social progress: democratic capitalism and a religiously informed, yet officially secular, state law.18 As we shall see, both ASMA and Cordoba evolved significantly during the first decade after 9/11. Yet throughout that time, Rauf and Khan reiterated the Abrahamic narrative that Rauf had outlined at the 2003 Cordoba Bread Fest, elaborated on in his 2004 book, and repeated during hundreds of international speaking engagements. Closely examining the rendition of history in Rauf ’s 2004 book, as I do in the following chapters, reveals what many accounts of the 2010 mosque controversy missed: the precarious political stance—neither fully “liberal,” as the term is commonly understood, nor politically conservative— Rauf took as he sought to define the middle way of moderation. Foregrounding the shared intellectual history of the many positions Rauf shares with Newt Gingrich also illuminates a deeper history that the imam’s promotion of ­liberal



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inclusion omits: how many religious minorities—often immigrants caught between the American racial categories of “black” and “white”—lobbied for acceptance by echoing and adapting dominant white Protestant narratives of American meritocracy and exceptionalism, further marginalizing black Americans in the process. The intertwined political, economic, racial, and gendered contours of moderate Islam—at least, as Rauf and Khan presented them during the first decade after 9/11—are primary subjects of this book, but they are not its only focus. In addition to examining the ideas of Rauf and Khan and the ways their institutions grew and changed, I reveal how Muslims at Rauf ’s mosque responded to the work he and Khan were doing while they simultaneously attempted to live authentic Muslim lives—“balanced” ones, they often said; rarely did any use the term “moderate”—after 9/11. Many of these Muslims wanted to believe Rauf ’s arguments about Islam’s compatibility with American meritocracy and exceptionalism. At times, however, when their lived experiences failed to measure up to such ideals, these Muslims interpreted Rauf ’s emphases on Sufism and service differently than he did. As the years passed, the economy faltered, racist backlash belied initial optimism about the ostensibly postracial era inaugurated by the first black president, and Rauf and Khan spent less time with their Sufi community than on ASMA and Cordoba projects, some also began to question their definition of moderation and the inevitability of acceptance. After the Cordoba House controversy, as I discuss in the final chapter of this book, even Rauf came to question some aspects of the American exceptionalism he had previously promoted. I first learned of the ASMA Society two years after Rauf ’s PBS interview, at Riverside Church in 2004. Financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Riverside has hosted visitors as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Kofi Annan, Dick Cheney, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.19 Because I had long been curious about the ways Americans combine ideas about national and religious belonging—particularly as they do so in narratives of “Judeo-­ Christian” heritage (itself a twentieth-century invention20)—I visited the neoGothic building in 2003 for New York City’s second 9/11 interreligious memorial service. I noticed immediately that the service did not include Muslims. I also noticed, however, that James Forbes (the senior pastor) carefully interrupted the “Judeo-Christian” language with which many speakers distanced Muslims from Americanness. Therefore, I was not entirely surprised the following March to learn that a local imam would be speaking from Forbes’ pulpit.

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INTRODUCTION

Rauf ’s message on that late winter morning in 2004 was that America’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage is actually a tri-fold Abrahamic one. Fascinated, curious as to whether he said the same thing at his mosque, and more intrigued by the question of how Muslims there responded to it, I accepted the invitation he extended to the audience to visit Masjid al-Farah in Tribeca. “Imam Feisal,” as the community called Rauf, was not present during my initial visit two weeks later. When I arrived, however, I found Faiz Khan (an emergency room doctor in his early thirties who was then serving as the assistant imam) delivering a similar message about religious commonality in the tiny storefront mosque. After the Friday prayer service ended, I told “Dr. Faiz” (his name at the mosque) of my interest in Rauf ’s message, and he and Dean (a sixty-five-year-old Sufi convert and self-described “Catholic boy from Brooklyn”) spent the afternoon informing me over a cramped diner counter about the ways Sufi practices of Islam promote interreligious unity.21 They also invited me to that evening’s dhikr session in Daisy Khan’s Upper West Side apartment, where I met other members of Rauf ’s Sufi group, including a Jewish American man. It was during the communal meal following dhikr—which had involved prayers, reciting portions of the Qur’an, and rhythmically chanting the attributes of God while swaying meditatively or spinning prayer beads through the ­fingers—that someone first handed me a promotional mock-up of Rauf ’s soonto-be-­published book.22 A blurb on the back, later replaced by a quote from author Karen Armstrong, asserted that this American imam shows how Islam is compatible with American democracy and capitalism. Although I had no doubts about the sincerity or intentions of either Rauf or Khan, I did immediately wonder about that promise and the politics that went with it. I decided I wanted to learn more. It was not long before I realized this project would consume my attention for the next several years. Not only did I begin to research the history of Rauf ’s ideas and the political and economic philosophies to which they were connected, I simultaneously began ethnographic work to explore how Muslims at the mosque grappled with his teachings in their daily lives. During my first evening at Khan’s apartment, before I knew Daisy had come of age in a rich Long Island community and once hopped a ride to Manhattan on the seaplane of Bernie Madoff ’s brother, it seemed clear that most of the Sufi dervishes there came from an affluent socio-economic bracket and might not object to Rauf ’s economic philosophy.23 What I also did not know then, however, was



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that Dean—the convert with whom I had spent the afternoon—lived in the same rent-controlled apartment in the West Village he had occupied for twenty years, and that Brother Malik—a black American high school teacher who would soon retire and become an assistant imam—lived just blocks from me in Harlem. Such things became evident only with time. During my six years of research, I learned that dynamics among the mosque attendees and Sufi practitioners were also more complicated than I first imagined. These Muslims came from backgrounds cutting across the social, economic, cultural, and racial spectra of New York. Their reasons for choosing Masjid al-Farah as their place of worship and Rauf as their imam (and also, sometimes, their Sufi shaykh) varied greatly. Moreover, I soon discovered, the mosque was not simply led by one devoted group of Sufis. Rather, its operations and purpose were negotiated by two overlapping communities—one led by Rauf and one led by Shaykha Fariha, the woman who owned the building housing the mosque. Although Rauf had founded his own Sufi order, Fariha, following instructions from the shaykh she and Rauf once shared, allowed him to conduct services there until he could establish the independent mosque and community center he and Daisy Khan dreamed of—one that would reflect American culture as they described it and help integrate Muslims. Not only did it take me several years to understand the complicated relationships between these overlapping (and constantly changing) communities, it took me that long to appreciate the many facets of Rauf ’s philosophy and the work of his and Khan’s constantly evolving organizations. To be clear, I was not seeking definitive accounts of “true” Islam, Americanness, or moderation in my research, as there is no single definition of any of these things. Rather, I was seeking to understand the pressures on Muslims to present themselves in particular ways in America and the creativeness Muslim Americans exercised, as well as the difficulties they encountered, in such circumstances. Because of this, while my analysis has often been informed by work in Islamic studies—particularly by works focusing on the lives and practices of Muslims in the United States—I have been equally influenced by the work of historians of American religion who have charted the political and economic dynamics involved in asserting Judeo-Christian heritage, and by those who have examined the Protestant underpinnings of American society— ones that still exert pressure on non-Protestant religious groups to mold their traditions into forms resembling certain Protestant ones by, to note just one example, encouraging theologies of work and wealth similar to those derived

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INTRODUCTION

from strands of American Calvinism.24 Additionally, I have looked to historical and anthropological analyses that point out the power dynamics involved in creating both academic and popular narratives about history and culture, commonality and difference. The theorists who draw attention to this kind of knowledge creation do not do so simply in order to prove that different groups (defined in terms of religion, culture, nation, race, gender, sexuality, or socioeconomic status, among other things) have been written out of such narratives. Rather, they often focus on the racial, gendered, economic, and political power dynamics of writing various groups in in different ways.25 As I began to undertake ethnographic work with the communities affiliated with Rauf ’s mosque, I also looked for inspiration to the work of scholars of “lived religion” who draw attention to the ways religious practitioners embody and inevitably, but often unintentionally, alter the norms of their traditions as they literally live them—not just in the confined spaces of houses of worship or devotional prayer groups, but in the warp and woof of their everyday circumstances.26 Additionally, because the lived circumstances of the Muslims I met were shaped by such things as airport screenings, subway bag searches, warrantless wiretapping, home invasions, detentions, and deportations (which mosque attendees told me about long before such things made headlines), as well as by a domestic environment of increasing economic inequality, political polarization, government surveillance, and race-based policing, I relied heavily on the works of American studies scholars to make sense of them. These include scholars who show how ideas about Islam have played a role in domestic policy debates over issues ranging from slavery to consumer capitalism ever since the colonial period, as well as those who investigate the philosophical, political, economic, and strategic connections between the Cold War and the so-called War on Terror.27 Last, but certainly not least, my analysis was influenced by direct criticism of attempts, such as Rauf ’s, to represent “moderate Islam.” Such criticism is not the goal of my account. To the contrary, I have found that Muslim Americans who fight for acceptance in this country, including Rauf, are sometimes put into horrendously difficult situations and faced with seemingly impossible choices. Still, I recognize that criticism is something to which my account may contribute. I address that possibility here and in other chapters by discussing the other kinds of analysis that could be useful for understanding the effects on contemporary Muslim American communities of having to prove their moderation.28



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The Stakes of Moderate Islam In the years since 9/11, both scholars and activists have questioned the pressure on Muslim Americans to prove their moderation, particularly the demand that Muslim Americans act as liaisons between the US government and Muslim communities in other locations. Rauf is not unaware of such critiques. In 2007, in fact, he published an essay in a collection titled Debating Moderate Islam: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West. That collection—the result of a formal conversation among religious leaders, scholars, and policy analysts about the usefulness of the “moderate” label and the politics behind it—focused mainly on foreign policy issues rather than on the domestic ones discussed here. Secondarily, though, it questioned the effects of pressure on Muslim Americans to participate in State Department programs or to serve in some other way as liaisons between the United States and Muslims elsewhere. While the contributors did not discuss other pressures on Muslims in the United States—ones that have since become public, such as the government’s mass arrests, detention, and abuse of Muslim immigrants in the days after 9/11; the placement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of innocent Muslim American citizens on the government’s No-Fly List of suspected terrorists and subsequent refusal to remove their names unless these citizens agreed to spy on friends and families; and the New York Police Department’s decade-long secret surveillance program that involved placing undercover (pseudo-Muslim) officers in mosques, student groups, and recreation centers, among other things29—these government actions placed much more psychic and physical stress on Muslim Americans than did more genteel attempts by State Department officials to enlist “moderate” spokespersons in promoting US interests. And although aware of at least some of the possible pitfalls of enacting the role of “moderate” sought by the US government, Rauf also knew of some of these law enforcement and surveillance tactics and sought to relieve the pressure exerted by them. After 9/11, several worshippers from Masjid al-Farah were summoned to police headquarters for interrogations about their lives, histories, religious practices, and relations. Others, I am told, simply disappeared. Although the extent of invasive surveillance campaigns carried out by the National Security Administration and the New York Police Department would not become clear until nearly a decade later, Rauf had begun working with the FBI as early as 2003 to try to dissuade intelligence officials from categorizing all Muslims as

12

INTRODUCTION

possible terrorists.30 These were not things he generally discussed in public, however, and he also tended to discourage anyone else, such as Faiz Khan—his assistant imam until 2006 and someone who had cofounded the ASMA Society along with Rauf and Daisy Khan in 1997—from doing so. Caught between desires to defend his community from immediate threats and to be accepted by non-Muslim elites who could improve that community’s situation in the long term, Rauf acknowledged in his contribution to the debate over “moderate Islam” that “the term ‘moderate Muslim’ is problematic.”31 Never­theless, he acceded to the latter desire when he contended, “we need to define . . . Muslims who can be worked with” (presumably, in this case, for foreign policy ends) “and those who cannot.” He then proceeded to enact his moderation by reiterating his primary message of Abrahamic commonality and arguing that the United States has had a “profound impact” on Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish societies around the world. “It is time for an American Islam,” he continued, “that will translate into the Islamic and Western vernacular . . . the best of the United States: its pursuit of the second religious commandment [loving one’s neighbor as oneself] through the benefits of an Islamic democratic capitalism.”32 Additionally, Rauf promoted his Shariah Index Project—a ­Cordoba Initiative program he started in order to evaluate the Islamic authenticity (or shari‘ah compliance) of various countries’ legal systems, and one that would consume most of his energy after the failure of Cordoba House.33 Commenting on the debate about moderation to which Rauf contributed, Columbia University anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, quoting political philosopher Leo Strauss, noted that repressed groups often feel compelled to “coordinate speech with such views as the government believes to be ­expedient.”34 Less intentionally, Mamdani cautioned, repressed groups may internalize “repression as common sense” and even promote it themselves to some extent. The appropriate action for scholars in such circumstances, he continued, is to resist the expedient views—in this case, the idea that there are only two kinds of Muslims, “moderates” and “extremists”—and to “broaden the parameters of discussion” by examining the histories of such ideas and the politics connected to them. Following Mamdani’s lead but focusing on domestic issues rather than international ones, I do just that in the pages that follow, keeping in mind as I do so that defending Muslims by promoting certain kinds of moderation was something always done—by Rauf, Khan, and many who worked with them—with an eye on the very real consequences of being deemed “immoderate.”



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Chapter Summary Making Moderate Islam opens with an examination of Rauf ’s philosophies, bringing to light the host of racialized tenets about American meritocracy and exceptionalism on which his 2004 book relies. In the first chapter, I parse the components of Rauf ’s narrative of moderate Islam in order to reveal the political, economic, and philosophical similarities between Rauf ’s thought and that of some of his detractors—in particular, Newt Gingrich. These similarities, in turn, illuminate the racialized tropes of assimilation and inevitable upward mobility many marginalized religious groups have echoed and adapted while explaining their own traditions in ways that demonstrate compatibility with American free-market capitalism and Protestant-derived secularism. I turn in Chapter 2 to how Rauf ’s father, a high-profile immigrant imam from whom Rauf derived much of his material, worked with Catholic and Jewish neoliberals in the 1970s while competing with other Muslim leaders— particularly, black Americans—to serve as a spokesperson for Muslims in the United States. I include in this chapter some of the political and economic developments that have given rise to tensions between some black American Muslims and American Muslims of Arab and South Asian ancestry. These tensions, which involve contests since the 1960s over political representation, religious authority, and economic resources, have inspired both black American and immigrant Muslims to emphasize their embrace of free-market capitalism and their participation in community service as they jockey for influence with American elites. As I discuss at the end of the book, they also contributed to the estrangement of Rauf and Khan from many other Muslim American groups during the 2010 controversy and cost the Cordoba House project valuable support at a time when it was most needed. In Chapters 3 and 4, I map in detail the creation and evolution of the organizations launched by Rauf and Khan. I begin by locating Rauf and his Sufi order within the history of Sufism in the United States, then turn to his and Khan’s shift from describing their work as Sufi, American, and cultural in orientation to interreligious, international, and policy-oriented. In the process, I show how their goals and self-presentations changed as they attempted to accomplish their objectives while simultaneously meeting different non-Muslim elites’ shifting demands for particular kinds of moderate spokespersons. Although I discuss some of the racial and ethnic assumptions underlying Rauf ’s cultural, sociological, and historical writings in the fourth chapter, I describe

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INTRODUCTION

these in more detail in Chapter 5, where I show how Rauf positioned Sufism as the bridge between a multitude of differences, including those separating immigrant Muslims from black American Muslims, rich Muslims from poor, Sunni from Shi‘a, and (in his words) Islam from the West. Taking a more ethnographic turn, Chapter 5 also looks at how Rauf ’s dervishes struggled with aspects of his and Khan’s definition of moderation, particularly Rauf ’s insistence that Muslims engage in the “greater jihad” of overcoming their own limited cultural traditions so as to align their practice of Islam with American democracy and capitalism. Examining some of the issues New York Sufis faced in trying to live this moderate Islam after 2001, I focus on the ways they adopted and altered such arguments so as to deal with the racial, economic, and political disparities they confronted. Like Chapter 5, Chapter 6 is primarily ethnographic and examines the ways New York Muslims dealt with the gaps between the idea of America put forth by Rauf and Khan and the realities—particularly, the gendered realities—of their daily lives. Promoting Muslim women’s rights became a central component of their work (and of their self-presentation as moderates) during the decade after 9/11, and they made the same assertions about women’s equality in the United States as they did about the equality of religious and racial minorities, presenting it as a fait accompli. For many women who attended Masjid al-Farah, though, gender equality was more elusive, not because they were Muslim—in fact, many found the complementary models of gender parity often presented at the mosque to be more realistic and genuinely egalitarian than their lived realities outside the mosque—but because social gains for women in the United States still failed, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, to meet the hopes and promises of liberal feminists. Chapter 6 also looks at the ways attitudes at the mosque toward women’s rights activists and toward the female religious leaders who were part of the community varied not just in relation to religious doctrine, but in relation to how much these women engaged in various kinds of community service. During the six years I spent attending Friday prayers, dhikr sessions, birthday parties, baby showers, weddings, and other gatherings, I constantly heard Muslims connected to Rauf ’s Sufi group and mosque talk about embodying authentically American Islam by engaging in acts ranging from military service to staffing soup kitchens. The service expected of women, however—particularly those who commanded any kind of authority—was not just the voluntary service by which religious minorities have attempted to prove their American-



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ness over the last century. Rather, it was the sort of unremunerated care work often expected of women throughout the United States, be it care for friends, for families, or for religious communities. Such service—by women or men—is something that can be regarded as part of Sufi practice. Indeed, as Rauf and Khan spent increasing amounts of time away over the years in order to pursue their ASMA and Cordoba projects, Rauf enjoined his dervishes to take up greater responsibilities of service to their Sufi order and community. As I discuss in Chapter 7—which includes a larger examination of the politics, hopes, and fears animating the emphasis on community service among American Muslims since the Islamic center controversy—some of Rauf ’s dervishes interpreted his instructions to serve and to model moderation in ways other than he intended, leading to the 2010 split within Rauf ’s group and to the ultimate demise of the Islamic center project as he envisioned it. By bringing to light the history and ramifications of the moderate models Rauf and Khan advocated, Making Moderate Islam lays bare the racism, as well as the ideas about gender, built into dominant US understandings of Muslim moderation and immigrant assimilation. Further, it exposes some of the pressures put on Muslims fighting for acceptance in the United States by people— including government officials—who have their own agendas. Not only does my account reveal the painful choices that many spokespersons for Muslim Americans face and, even more, the gaps between high-minded ideals and the lived experiences of Muslims in the United States, it also illuminates the ways that marginalized groups in America have often gained provisional acceptance (though not always equality) at the expense of others. In so doing, Making Moderate Islam both exposes the power dynamics in which Muslim Americans are caught at the beginning of the twenty-first century and calls into question the larger limits of liberal inclusion for religious and racial minorities in the United States and the longer histories of provisional tolerance that have masqueraded as “acceptance.”

1 IS LA MIC TRADITI O N S AND CONSERVATIVE LI B E R AL IS MS

“A M E R I C A WA S F O U N D E D on Judeo-Christian principles—that’s the basis of our laws, and people try to deny it,” claimed Representative Mike Reynolds, author of a 2010 bill to ban the use of Islamic law in Oklahoma courts. Although midterm elections often seem unremarkable, the 2010 election was an exception, as various critics of the Cordoba House project—particularly Republicans on the far right and those catering to the Tea Party, a new right-wing political movement—tried to harness opposition to the so-called Ground Zero Mosque for electoral gain. Similar ballot initiatives appeared in over two dozen states during the next two years, with supporters frequently emphasizing that the use of Islamic law in the United States would violate America’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Use of the words “Judeo-Christian” to describe US history and identity is ubiquitous in American political rhetoric. The term is a seemingly timeless characterization of American society. Crucially, not only does the expression have a much shorter and more complicated history than its ancient connotations convey, but it is also often employed euphemistically to denote a Christian (and, more specifically, Protestant) perspective or position.1 As late as World War II, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman found their attempts to create national religious cohesion challenged by the fact that they could not get Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders to participate in interreligious endeavors, primarily because conservative Protestants refused to work with Catholics.2 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in contrast, the notion that the United States has a Judeo-Christian heritage was firmly cemented in the minds

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of ­conservative Protestants like Reynolds. Yet, despite this strongly stated conviction about the country’s dual heritage, Reynolds clarified in his same comments the singular nature of the impulse that led him to introduce State Question 755: concern “about Christian values in our nation.”3 Evangelical politicians cited America’s Judeo-Christian character as a reason why Muslims posed a national threat before the Ground Zero Mosque debate of 2010. For example, when the first Muslim elected to Congress—black American Keith Ellison from Minnesota—performed his oath of office with Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an instead of a Bible in 2006, Republican Congressman Virgil Goode warned that “we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon of freedom-loving peoples around the world.”4 It was in response to claims like these that Feisal Abdul Rauf promoted his narrative of Abrahamic (Jewish-Christian-Muslim) tradition after 9/11 and penned his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam. Although many advocates of interfaith cooperation echoed his narrative after 9/11, it was not always well received—particularly not after the Ground Zero Mosque debate. At a January 2012 campaign stop in South Carolina, for example, presidential candidate Rick Santorum not only spoke in terms of Judeo-Christian heritage, he pointedly excluded Muslims from so-called Abrahamic traditions and from the ethical lineage that stems from them. Equality “doesn’t come from Islam . . . It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Santorum, a conservative Catholic, argued.5 (Muslims trace their religious lineage not through Isaac, but through Ishmael, Abraham’s first son.) Santorum was not Rauf ’s only conservative Catholic detractor. Newt Gingrich, another 2012 Republican presidential candidate, was a more prominent spokesperson for the anti-Muslim movement and against Cordoba House. Long active in trumpeting the nation’s Judeo-Christian history, Gingrich led the Republican takeover of Congress on a “family values” platform in 1994. After he was charged with eighty-four counts of ethics violations, the former Southern Baptist retired from Congress in 1998 and pursued a new religious and political path: he converted to his third wife’s Catholic faith and founded Gingrich Productions to promote his “vision of an America in which a belief in the Creator is once again at the center.”6 This vision characterizes his 2010 film about the dangers of “radical Islam” called America At Risk: A War with No Name, as well as his 2010 and 2011 books, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s



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Secular-Socialist Machine and A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters.7 Between 2010 and 2012, Gingrich went to extraordinary lengths to condemn Cordoba House and the larger Abrahamic vision of America it was to instantiate. Yet his rhetoric overstated his ideological differences with Rauf. Undoubtedly, he and politicians like Santorum are in many ways more socially conservative than the imam.8 Nevertheless, as I demonstrate below, both Rauf ’s and Gingrich’s philosophies are liberal in terms of the Lockean liberalism evoked in the Declaration of Independence, of Progressive Era liberals who viewed Protestant America as the triumphant culmination of world history (a theme each modifies to include Catholicism or Islam), and of the post-Great Society neoliberalism that stresses individual responsibility, the privatization or repeal of state welfare provisions, and government involvement in the economy primarily on behalf of the market.9 This latter variety of market liberalism has often come to define the political perspectives of politicians and pundits like Gingrich—ones more commonly called “conservative.” Tellingly, although Rauf describes American society as “Abrahamic” and Gingrich insists it is “Judeo-Christian” in culture and origin, both define the nation’s identity in terms of an exceptional “American Creed” based on US founding documents, fortified by religious roots and replete with economic implications. A closer look at this creed reveals the liberal philosophies of rights and neoliberal economic arrangements—including those in which religious organizations, rather than the state, provide community services—central to each man’s story of American progress and uniqueness. Meanwhile, a closer look at the history that led them to write such narratives illuminates how the racialized themes of service and anti-socialism have been central to religious minorities’ struggles for acceptance since at least the mid-twentieth century—but not in the ways Gingrich and Rauf suggest.

The American Creed: Common Ethics, Liberal Rights, and Liberal Markets In his 2004 book, Rauf mixes theology with history, sociology, psychology, biology, and even game theory. His argument is structured to demonstrate how US political and economic systems progressively evolved to fulfill Islamic norms, even though the lives and traditions of Muslim Americans have been little ­noticed until fairly recently. The core of the book focuses on what Islam and the

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United States can offer each other, and this discussion is framed by an opening segment on common Abrahamic origins and a later chapter on contemporary historical convergence. That later chapter is devoted to demonstrating how Protestant-dominated America developed into a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish nation whose leaders imbued society with Abrahamic ethics. It also forecasts the inevitable Americanization and acceptance of Muslims. Rauf ’s footnotes for these sections read as a “who’s who” of American intellectuals, such as sociologist Will Herberg, author of the 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology,10 and as an inventory of iconic Muslim thinkers, including the twelfth-century Sufi thinker Muhammad ibn al-Ghazali, whom Rauf likens to Protestant reformer Martin Luther.11 His penultimate chapter on history is the progressive narrative’s denouement, a demonstration of Rauf ’s frequently iterated assertion that “America is substantively an ‘Islamic’ country . . . whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of government.”12 A final chapter outlines the “New Vision for Muslims and the West” promised in the subtitle of the book. This new vision for getting Muslims and other Americans to recognize their common Abrahamic heritage and ethics and to jointly export American liberal democracy and free markets contains action items for the US government, for educators, for the media, and for religious communities (all targets of ASMA and Cordoba programming), as well as for business elites. For evidence of the Abrahamic-American ethical convergence, Rauf points to the nation’s founding documents and the liberal philosophies of religion, reason, and rights they express. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution exemplify “the core values” of the Abrahamic ethic, he argues. Because the Declaration of Independence “ground[ed] itself in reason, just as the Quran and the Abrahamic ethic did in asserting the self-evident oneness of God,” he asserts, it embodies the moral and philosophical worldview revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.13 Referencing the third and thirtieth chapters (suras) of the Qur’an, the imam also introduces readers to the Islamic concepts of nature (al-fitrah) and the “religion” of nature (din al-fitrah, which he translates as “natural religion”).14 Rauf then compares these Qur’anic teachings on what he calls the Islamic tradition of natural religion with the Declaration’s mention of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” concluding that the natural law referred to in the nation’s founding documents is synonymous with what Muslims call shari‘ah.15 For Rauf, shari‘ah is not just complementary to American values, it is based in the same mixture of reason and revelation. Consequently, although



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no political society on earth will ever embody Islamic precepts as fully as the Prophet Muhammad’s did, the United States comes as close as possible and constitutes a “shariah-compliant” state.16 While expanding Will Herberg’s tri-fold narrative of Protestant-CatholicJewish America into one of Muslim-Christian-Jew, Rauf addresses some of the potential concerns non-Muslim interlocutors might have. One is that an Abrahamic framing cannot accommodate broad religious diversity. In response, Rauf points to the pluralistic history of many Muslim-governed societies (­especially Cordoba) and repeatedly asserts that religious freedom is fundamental to Islam. (God, after all, endowed humans with free will.) Additionally, he reemphasizes the “natural” aspect of his argument and puts it in terms of the Founders’ prescriptions. Quoting Hamilton and Jefferson on the divinely inspired laws of nature, Rauf posits that, when the Founders cited the God-given “rights of ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’” they adumbrated “cardinal moral truths” that all religious groups uphold.17 Because all Americans hold these founding tenets and rights in common, he concludes, these values constitute the American Creed—a “peculiarly American” form of the Abrahamic ethic to which even atheists subscribe.18 In addition to arguing that all Americans subscribe to the basic truths of Islam, whether they recognize it or not, Rauf attempts to neutralize fears of Islamic law—namely, of the violence commonly depicted as inherent to shari‘ah— and to build the basis for incorporating Muslims into state processes. In a point meant to dispel the image of corporal punishment, among other things, Rauf reminds his readers that US laws already “institutionalize” the Abrahamic ethic.19 Therefore, they already accomplish the goals shari‘ah is designed to effect. 20 Further, because Muslims are commanded to observe the laws of the societies in which they live, he clarifies, they have no need to reject or re-create them. However, Rauf admonishes, the United States does fall short on its pluralistic promise by not permitting Muslims the same accommodations afforded other religious minorities (e.g., Jewish Americans): the ability to consult their own bodies of law to settle “personal status” cases involving divorce, child custody, and inheritance.21 At the very least, he proposes, the judiciary could have advisors who operate as translators between religious communities and legal authorities and who advise judges on whether laws are “kosher or Shariah-­compliant.” Because the United States already embodies the Abrahamic ethic, Rauf reiterates, such a system would not challenge most legal decisions. Crucially, though, creating this kind of “subsidiary entity within the judiciary” would help turn

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the increasingly secular country back to its faith-based founding. Moreover, it would demonstrate to Muslims in the rest of the world that the United States is a God-centered nation rather than a secular materialist one.22 Finally, Rauf argues that divine law and the Declaration of Independence mandate certain economic arrangements—ones badly needed in the Muslim world. These are “free enterprise and a free market economy,” which, when coupled with individual rights and concern for the disadvantaged, he believes, “imply vigorous economic competition and high social mobility.”23 Together, Rauf asserts, democracy and free-market capitalism create a social environment that enables believers to live out the primary commandment underlying all authentic religions: to “love one’s neighbor” as oneself. Proof of this resides in American “democratic capitalism,” which—because it combines “democracy with a free-market economy,” he argues—has fueled a historically unprecedented expansion of freedom and equality for all peoples.24 Rauf acknowledges that Americans sometimes fail to live up to their founding ideals, and his 2004 book is not short on critique, from the labeling of civilian casualties in Iraq as “collateral damage” instead of “terrorism” to US support for repressive regimes.25 Nevertheless, he forecasts, once Muslims and other Americans recognize their commonalities, they can jointly reorient wayward American practices back to their Abrahamic origins and, by extending democratic capitalism around the world, undercut extremism—what he defines as a response to both “militant secularism” and material deprivation.26 With these goals in mind, Rauf explains in the book’s final pages, he created the Cordoba Initiative.27 Five years after publishing his treatise on how to recreate the spirit of Cordoba, Rauf announced plans to open Cordoba House. Less than a year later, the backlash was so severe that Roger Cohen of the New York Times wrote, “not since 9/11 has Islamophobia been at such a pitch in the United States.”28 This backlash took several forms, including violence against Muslims and those taken to be Muslim (often Sikhs) and the destruction or vandalizing of mosques and other Muslim-owned properties across the nation.29 Instead of engaging in such overt acts of aggression, some Americans protested the creation or expansion of other mosques and Islamic centers,30 while others concentrated on combatting the scenario Gingrich frequently warned against in his 2010 film: the Muslim conquest of America effected, in part, by replacing the Constitution with shari‘ah.31 As Cohen noted in his Times piece, “[s]hariah is the new hotbutton wedge issue, as radicalizing as abortion or gay marriage, seized on by



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Republicans to mobilize conservative Americans against the supposed ‘stealth jihad’ of Muslims in the United States and against a Democratic president portrayed as oblivious to—or complicit with—the threat.”32 It is unlikely that Gingrich failed to notice the political benefits of denouncing the Cordoba House project or of vowing to outlaw Islamic law in the United States during his multi-year campaign for the presidency.33 Admittedly, Gingrich’s reasons for opposing Rauf could be attributed to significant policy d ­ ifferences— 34 particularly on Mideast issues. Nevertheless, what many people might find surprising is the extent to which the premises of Gingrich’s philosophy overlap with Rauf ’s. This overlap is most evident in the ways Gingrich similarly attributes America’s unique combination of religion, reason, and (economic) liberties to the American Creed exemplified in the nation’s founding documents. “The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and the unique American identity that arose from a civilization that honored them, form what we call today ‘American Exceptionalism,’” Gingrich argues in the introduction to his 2011 book.35 Starting with his first chapter—devoted to outlining how the American Creed, grounded in natural law, was forged from a mix of Enlightenment reason and religious devotion—Gingrich stresses the importance of recovering the ethos of the Revolutionary era. Only in so doing can the nation avert impending disaster and prosper in the free-market manner the Founding Fathers intended.36 The fact that Gingrich’s liberal creed so closely resembles Rauf ’s is no accident, though it is also by no means intentional. Their commonalities stem from their reliance on common sources—ones not immediately apparent because the two do not cite the same authors in the portions of their analyses devoted to liberal democracy or US republican history. Focusing on the neoliberal economic precepts each derives from the American Creed, however, allows the individuals and institutions that influenced their models of American exceptionalism to emerge and reveals a more complicated history of American religious minorities than their narratives acknowledge.

Uncommon Allies: The Sources of American Muslim Exceptionalism For his account of the American Creed and American liberal democracy, Rauf relies on the Reverend Forrest Church, who was in 2004 the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side. Author of over

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twenty books with such notable titles as God and Other Liberals, Church published The American Creed: a Spiritual and Patriotic Primer in 2002.37 In his “Preamble,” Church notes the term’s coinage by G. K. Chesterton. An Englishman, Chesterton wrote following his 1921 trip to the United States that it “is ‘the only nation in the world founded on a creed,’ one set forth ‘with theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.’”38 America’s religious nature is something Church traces in part to John Locke’s influence on the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. In fact, Church opens the first chapter of his work with a quote from Locke’s ­Second Treatise on Government: “In the beginning, all the world was America,” a statement Locke makes partly in service of his argument that all true and good governance is founded on the principles of natural law.39 While the “Enlightenment religious values” Locke expressed are crucial to the nation’s founding frameworks, Church points out, they are not original. Rather, Locke drew inspiration first from Americans—specifically, his friend William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania and preceded Locke in arguing for natural rights to liberty and property.40 In addition to explicating Locke’s natural law philosophies, Church refers to Jefferson and Hamilton using the same quotes from each that appear in Rauf ’s later work.41 In subsequent chapters, Church argues that the religious nature of the country is not as specific as it may seem, asserting that “America is not a Christian nation. It is, however, a religious one.”42 This attempt to resolve the tension between America’s fundamentally influential religious heritage and its pluralist promise is a feature the narratives of Rauf and Gingrich share. All three writers emphasize that what unites the country despite diversity and allows the nation’s original values to cohere are the common ethics shared by Americans of all true faiths. For Church, the Deistic influences of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were crucial in forming, along with the American Creed of natural rights, a pluralist faith-based civic ethic that transcends religious differences. “Deistic thought adapted the core of Christian ethical value,” secularizing it somewhat by “temper[ing] Christianity’s theological authority,” Church argues, and left in its place what he believes Franklin had advocated (and what Rauf also emphasizes): a “public religion” and a “shared ethic more important than any single theological expression.”43 Among the outcomes of this Protestant-derived ethic—and each author emphasizes the work habits central to it—are “charity” (Rauf and Church) and the “voluntarism” necessary to create a robust “civil society” (Rauf and Gingrich).44



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As to the crucial ethical and political issue of racial inequality, Church, Rauf, and Gingrich all turn to the Creed’s progressive fulfillment in the work of various visionaries. Responding to historian Martin Marty’s question of whether the principles of the Declaration of Independence can be considered a creed “inclusive enough to involve the whole nation,” Church answers, “with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., I believe they do and can.”45 These figures serve the same function in the histories of Gingrich and Rauf, demonstrating America’s progressively expanding liberties and even proving the validity of the “American dream.”46 The invocation of King illuminates another of the authors’ greatest thematic commonalities—the fight against both godly and godless extremists—as well as their irreconcilable differences. In addition to extolling religiously rooted natural rights and a trajectory of political and economic liberation, Rauf, Gingrich, and Church all use the specter of Islamic terrorism to emphasize the imperative of recovering America’s original ethics. Only by reclaiming the United States’ foundational liberal vision, they believe, can the nation meet the pressing challenges posed by historic and contemporary nemeses: secular materialism and what Church calls the “jihad” of “neo-tribalism.”47 In fact, one reason Church sees the Creed as crucial for the twenty-first century is because Chesterton’s claim that the United States is a “nation with the soul of a church” simultaneously highlights America’s historic difference from the Soviet Union and contradicts those in the Muslim world who “caricature the U.S. as ‘soulless’ or as ‘the great infidel.’”48 In contrast to these extremists, irreligious on the one hand and fanatical on the other, Church and Rauf depict the American Creed as fundamentally moderate. For Church, King exemplified moderation by bending neither to the antiintegration criticisms of fundamentalist minister Jerry Falwell on the right nor to the militancy of black leaders like Malcolm X on the left.49 Instead, King called for “all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” to “join hands.”50 Depicted this way, King serves as a testament to racial equality and to liberal Judeo-Christian unity against the designs of both Christian fundamentalists (Falwell—who, like Gingrich at that time, was a Southern Baptist) and Muslim “militants” (Malcolm X).51 In Rauf ’s account, moderation is also a platform erected between religious extremists and secularists. This simultaneous reliance on and distancing from the specter of Islamic terrorism characterizes not only Rauf ’s Abrahamic narrative but every rendition of the Cordoba Initiative’s changing website since its 2004

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i­ nception. It has also been a theme of Gingrich’s work since the 1990s and recalls an earlier period of American history, to which I return below, when religious ­minorities—some of them formerly Marxist—staked their claims to American identity by contrasting their traditions to communism and socialism. The similarities between these histories of the American Creed cannot erase the authors’ significant differences, of course. While Rauf lays claim to the mantle of moderation Church placed on King, for example, Gingrich uses the term “moderate” only once: in quoting Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that Old World virtues of economic moderation are regarded in America as “faint-heartedness” and lack of nerve.52 Further, the authors view progress and America’s unfinished tasks quite differently. Church’s account includes not just Americans who fought for racial, ethnic, and religious equality but individuals who labored to defend economically marginalized groups against robber barons and industrialists. Rauf adopts and extends Church’s twenty-first century vision. In his telling, Americans are so united by the attacks of 9/11 that even Republicans embrace Muslims as fellow citizens while the United States works through the United Nations to fulfill the country’s ultimate mission of defending human rights around the globe.53 Rather than viewing the UN Declaration of Human Rights as a natural extension of the American Creed, Gingrich more frequently depicts the United Nations as a body crippled by the influence of an “Islamic bloc” that unfairly targets Israel and impedes America’s international police power.54 Despite these differences, all believe faith-based civic and fiscal ethics fuel expanding freedoms and the divinely mandated global extension of political and economic liberties. Gingrich does not refer to Forrest Church or acknowledge Chesterton’s coining of the term “American Creed” in his 2011 treatise. Yet, while Church is a religious leader whom Gingrich would likely argue betrayed classical ­liberalism—a charge he levels against “modern liberals” who critique aspects of free-market capitalism—some points of similarity in their books are striking. Not least of these is their common argument that the American Creed is rooted in an American religious orientation subsequently developed in Locke’s writings—thus making his revolutionary philosophy originally American.55 This emphasis on Locke is a recent development for Gingrich, and a revealing one. Gingrich’s thoughts on the Founding Fathers changed following his conversion to Catholicism. Although he never mentioned Locke’s natural law philosophy in his previous works on American civilization, a significant portion of his



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2011 narrative is devoted to what he describes as Locke’s Catholic-derived combination of reason with religious devotion and to the influence it had on the Declaration of Independence.56 This thinking can be traced to an author whose work is also—with varying levels of attribution—fundamental to Rauf ’s: politically conservative Catholic American pundit Michael Novak. Gingrich credits ­Novak’s 2002 On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at America’s Founding with demonstrating Locke’s relevance to the American experiment. In that book, Novak likewise emphasizes the marriage of reason and religion in America’s founding, cites the natural law framework of the nation’s first apologists—though giving American natural rights a “Hebrew” and Catholic p ­ edigree—and positions religious freedom as the right underpinning all others.57 Novak is also intimately familiar with the thinker who first coined the term “American Creed.” In fact, he wrote the introduction to the fifth volume of Chesterton’s collected works. In that 1987 essay, Novak compares Chesterton’s concept of economic “distributism” with the economic philosophy that Novak made famous: “democratic capitalism.”58 From the 1970s through the beginning of the twenty-first century, Novak’s work on democratic capitalism at the American Enterprise Institute provided a theological basis for neoliberal thought that emphasized individual responsibility in the context of free people, free markets, and free trade.59 Maintaining that no political economy would ever match the ideals of the Kingdom of God (contrary to what he and his formerly socialist colleagues had once suggested), Novak promoted instead what he called democratic capitalism—which he traced directly to Locke.60 Gingrich’s 2010 and 2011 books both include copious references to Novak’s work at the American Enterprise Institute. In the acknowledgements of his 2010 book opposing Obama, secularism, and socialism, for example, Gingrich thanked Novak personally for contributing intellectual insights to the project and thanked the host of scholars, research assistants, and funders at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who helped him finish it.61 In 2011, after twelve years as a fellow at AEI and now openly Catholic, Gingrich also acknowledged his debt to Novak’s 1983 The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and Novak’s interpretation of Locke.62 Rauf (like Church) acknowledges Novak only once, citing an opinion piece Novak wrote for the New York Times to buttress his point that the “unfinished business” of both the Muslim world and the West is religious in nature. Although Rauf ’s endnotes never mention Novak’s 1983 treatise on theology, politics, and economics, Novak’s argument for the superiority of free-market

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society (based on both religious freedom and the biblical ethic of neighborly love) over centralized economies is replicated in every chapter of Rauf ’s book.63 It is also at the heart of how Rauf defines the “unfinished business of the Muslim world”: implementing democratic capitalism in a way that is shari‘ahcompliant.64 As I discuss below, although Rauf primarily cites Church’s work on American history, the American Creed, and the American dream, his economic analysis derives from and more closely resembles Novak’s. Rauf ’s reliance on the work of both self-professed liberals and avowed conservatives need not be read as contradictory, as Rauf ’s claim—in contrast to the claims of Church and Gingrich, who locate themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum—is the middle way: the path of the moderate. Tacking back and forth between extolling New Deal programs and praising the cumulative social effects of self-reliance and self-interest, however, Rauf ’s narrative exemplifies the difficulty of finding a coherent position that can be accepted at a time of increasing political polarization. He resolves this difficulty by pinning moderation to a form of religious practice that blends the economic entrepreneurialism of free-market enthusiasts with the community consciousness of socially minded reformers. Before turning to the social-spiritual practice Rauf prescribes, it is worth examining how his reliance on Novak replicates and illuminates an earlier history in which religious minorities emphasized common civic ethics—including those of voluntarism and community service—and market freedom in order to claim American belonging.

Neoliberalism, Religious Minorities, and the Messiness of Moderation Novak argued in 2002 that “the American Republic more closely matches the Catholic vision of the Good city than any prior civilization in history.”65 This is an argument he has had decades of practice making. During the late 1970s, with US foreign policy concerns divided, in part, between the petro-politics of the Middle East and the growth of Catholic liberation theology in Latin America, Novak led several meetings decrying liberation theology and promoting his philosophy of democratic capitalism at the American Enterprise Institute. Along with other former socialists, such as Irving Kristol, Novak coordinated a multi-faith theological defense of the American free enterprise system. AEI published the proceedings of one such conference in a 1979 volume Novak edited, titled Capitalism and Socialism: A Theological Inquiry, which contained



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contributions from Protestants, Catholics, and Jews on the necessary “JudeoChristian” basis of a free and capitalistic society, as well as on the origins of “American exceptionalism.”66 Not only did Novak and his colleagues attempt to demonstrate American capitalism’s religious superiority at a moment when socialist movements seemed to proliferate among Latin American Catholics, they did so in a climate of domestic political backlash against civil rights legislation and new affirmative action programs that historians have labeled a late-Cold War “white ethnic revival.”67 During that time, several socially conservative Catholic and Jewish intellectuals argued that true religion supported personal responsibility and market freedom, and they depicted attempts “to define social justice in economic terms or in terms of the redistribution of wealth . . . [as] subversive and ‘militant.”68 In so doing, one historian has observed, they “affirmed the place of Catholics and Jews” of Eastern or Southern European heritage beside Anglo-Saxon Protestants—to the exclusion of other racial and ethnic groups, particularly black Americans.69 Part of the process of affirming Catholic and Jewish whiteness involved echoing earlier twentieth-century Protestants’ liberal narratives of American exceptionalism but translating them into multi-religious, neoliberal ones. ­Articulations of Protestant-Catholic-Jewish commonality had only really begun to take hold among white elites in the United States after World War II.70 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Irish and Italian Catholics—often described by Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the same racial terms used to refer to freed slaves—and Eastern and Southern European Jewish immigrants labored to distance themselves from black populations with whom they were sometimes grouped. Then, during the era of world wars, some Catholic and Jewish leaders attempted to widen the space afforded their communities in the United States by contesting narratives that conflated progress with Protestantism and Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Most did not do so by challenging the racial and economic exclusions on which that progress was based; as a compromise with southern Democrats, for example, Roosevelt’s New Deal exempted occupations held by black, Latino, and other minorities from workers rights provisions.71 Rather, they emphasized that their traditions supported it, as well.72 The upward economic mobility these “white” but “ethnic” immigrants subsequently enjoyed during the 1950s—in large part due to the GI Bill, whose education and housing provisions black American veterans struggled to secure at a time of open institutionalized racism—seemed proof of their claims.

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By the end of the 1960s, civil rights, black power, and third-worldist movements helped transform voting and immigration laws, understandings of culture and progress, and the very demographics of the United States. While many citizens seemed to have something to gain from these changes, others believed they had as much to lose—including their own tenuous claims to whiteness. As both multiculturalism and affirmative action policies proliferated, some formerly marginalized religious and ethnic elites who had benefited from government economic programs in the past began to stress that a leveled playing field of meritocracy, not affirmative action, was now the best way to manage disparity. Appeals to Locke—and to his ostensibly critical influence on the nation’s founders—featured centrally in some white ethnics’ narratives of American uniqueness, as well as in their attempts to distance themselves from the specter of communism and socialism at home and abroad. This is despite the fact that Locke’s influence was surpassed during and after the Revolution by that of another Enlightenment figure, Charles de Montesquieu.73 For free-market enthusiasts, however, it was Locke who promoted the divine rights of “life, liberty, and property”—a phrase Jefferson transformed in the Declaration of Independence into “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Two hundred years later, with US economic arrangements seemingly under threat from without (communism and socialism) and within (affirmative action), white ethnic intellectuals helped bring Locke’s emphasis on divine rights to private property back en vogue.74 The new market liberals tended to depict the United States as though it had—for better or for worse—“emerged fully formed from the forehead of John Locke.”75 Some, such as Kristol, also tended to lament what they saw as the demise of the Puritan work ethic and other religious values in modern life.76 It was in this climate of political, cultural, and economic contestation—­ during which Catholic and Jewish political conservatives called for a return to America’s foundational Protestant work ethic in order to limit the economic provisions of the state—that influential Muslim Americans also began translating Qur’anic precepts in terms of common ethics and market freedom. One of these influential Muslims was Rauf ’s father, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf. Feisal Abdul Rauf ’s promotion of democratic capitalism and of Abrahamic ethics draws from his father’s work during the 1970s, a decade in which M ­ uhammad—who held degrees in Islamic studies from Cairo’s famed ­Al-Azhar University and from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London—served as the director of the first New York Islamic Center and



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then of the influential Islamic Center of Washington, DC. During the 1960s and 1970s, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf and others created Arab-centered progress narratives and in their writings invoked Arab modernists who based ethical frameworks—and, sometimes, political and economic systems—on the concept of divine tawhid (“oneness”).77 For some of these thinkers, Arab Islam is the most progressive spiritual force on earth, and it was Arab Muslims who had inaugurated modernity under the banner of tawhid, which offers universal laws and ethics that simultaneously echo and rival those of Christianity.78 In writing these narratives, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf and his colleagues fitted Islamic history into the structure of the European colonial progress narratives that early twentieth-century Protestant liberals—and, later, Catholic and Jewish conservatives—had also adapted for American purposes. Further, they attempted to build on burgeoning Jewish-Christian alliances in the United States. In 1967, with the Six Day War between Israel and neighboring Arab nations casting a shadow over American politics, Abdul-Rauf met for talks with Jewish leaders in New York and brought along his teenage son, giving him his first experience in interreligious dialogue.79 In 1979, during the escalating tensions wrought by the Iranian Revolution, as I discuss further in Chapter 2, AbdulRauf invoked interreligious commonality in an even larger forum: with a variety of scholars and theologians participating in that year’s American Academy of Religion meetings. Instead of a “Judeo-Christian dialogue,” they called their Jewish-Christian-Muslim panels an “Abrahamic Trialogue.”80 Abdul-Rauf also participated in seminars on religion and political economy that year, where he began to translate Islamic traditions once more—this time, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute. Not only was Novak a crucial figure in the “white ethnic revival” mentioned above, in the late 1970s he and AEI President William Baroody enlisted AbdulRauf to join Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in outlining a broadly monotheistic basis for the anti-socialist, neoliberal model of political economy they were promoting. The result: Abdul-Rauf contributed to Novak’s Capitalism and Socialism and published a separate book with the American Enterprise Institute—A ­Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism—devoted to Islam’s compatibility with American market liberalism.81 As I describe in Chapter 2, however, these assessments of American capitalism were not his last words on the subject. Feisal Abdul Rauf does not refer to his father’s work in What’s Right with Islam. Rather, while replicating some of his father’s ideas, Rauf replaces the Arabian locations of intellectual and interreligious exchange featured in his

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father’s progress history (such as Baghdad) with a center of culture more recognizable to American audiences: the European city of Cordoba. Moreover, although he identifies Muhammad Abdul-Rauf as “my father and greatest teacher” and credits his father with turning him into an imam, an equally important source for Rauf ’s moderate model is another of his “spiritual ancestors”: Shaykh ­Muzaffer Özak, who introduced Rauf to Sufism.82 Sufi practices and traditions are contested among Muslims worldwide, and Muhammad Abdul-Rauf—whose quasi-diplomatic positions at the high-­ profile Islamic centers of New York and Washington, DC, depended, in part, on the Egyptian government’s approval—rarely wrote about them. Feisal Abdul Rauf learned much of what he knew about Islamic law and theology from his father. It was Muzaffer Özak, however, who made him an imam by appointing him to lead Friday prayers for the members of his Jerrahi Sufi order. Under the influence of both men, Rauf increasingly devoted himself to educating young Muslims raised in the materialistic culture of 1980s and 1990s America about what, for him, is the most authentic practice of Islam: striving for spiritual as well as material affluence. Because the Protestant ethic shares Islam’s “defining ideals” that “religion and knowledge are compatible and that religion and wealth are compatible,” Rauf argues, this practice of striving for the here and the hereafter will, again, bring Muslims closer to other Americans.83

Sufi Striving: Translating Neoliberalism into Moderate Islam Rauf describes Sufi practices as ones that foster “heightened consciousness” and lead to acting in conformity with God’s commands. One who strives to increase her awareness of God will reflexively conduct herself in a manner that is ethical: “maintain[ing] correct behavior and courtesy (adab) before God and humankind.”84 Very few spiritual seekers will achieve perfection in this striving, he writes. Regardless, the Sufi path is one “[e]very human soul can and should begin to traverse.”85 This is, in part—as Rauf indicated in his 2004 book and also reiterated in Friday sermons at his mosque, often in market metaphors detailing the “dividends” of “investing” in spiritual practice—because Sufi striving for the here and the hereafter, the dunya (temporal world) and the akhira (eternal reality), is vital to creating individual lives and larger collectivities that are both affluent and ethical, thus balancing the tensions between liberal rights and liberal markets.



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It is Rauf ’s view of the relationship between religious practice and freemarket institutions that sets him apart from the progressives with whom he is often grouped. One of the most striking ways Rauf modifies the assessments he otherwise takes from Church is by providing an alternate description of that sometimes loathed institution, the corporation. He depicts the corporation as a necessary and valuable entity that “combined the Puritan ethic with easy access to capital” and exemplifies the democratic ethos of representative governance, albeit via shareholders rather than citizens.86 “Until the Muslim world finds a way to openly embrace these concepts and ideas in a manner consistent with Islamic law,” he projects, “it will continue to lag economically.”87 Again, the source of this philosophy is Novak, who wrote in a 1981 treatise published by AEI (Toward a Theology of the Corporation), that the “corporation is an invention of democratic capitalism . . . Neither participatory democracy nor capitalism could exist” without it.88 So ideal is corporate structure, in Novak’s estimation, that it serves as the best metaphor for religious community. Rauf does not idealize corporations to quite the same extent as Novak. Left unchecked, he cautions, they can entice people into perverting productive Protestant work ethics by seeking to accumulate endless wealth with no greater purpose and treating others—particularly those in developing countries—as instruments in the process. Nevertheless, Rauf ’s political and economic similarities to Novak are notable. Neither writer suggests that individual spiritual striving is entirely sufficient to render the market ethical, and they agree that some government oversight of the economy is important (though Novak later retracted this).89 However, both warn that too much governmental involvement will stifle progress even as it fails to produce social parity, which is more, they argue, than centralized economies can create. The government’s proper economic role, then, is to ensure the conditions conducive to free trade, such as a stable currency and “an economy free from state control.”90 According to Rauf, contemporary Americans are in a precarious situation, as most have come to believe that their social and economic progress was ­fueled by the separation of religion from the state, thanks to a “militant” form of secularism that has crept into US culture.91 Therefore, they may not have sufficient moral fortitude to resist material excess. Rather than increase governmental oversight of the economy to correct this imbalance, the answer is for Americans to learn from their Abrahamic siblings—particularly the spiritual “virtuosos” that Rauf discusses in the book’s section on Sufism—how to

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recapture America’s original civic ethics and to be properly religious again. By training one’s will to “enter consciously into a state of connection with God” through Sufi practice, the earnest seeker is transformed into an individual who reflexively enacts the universal commandment that, Rauf believes, is the very foundation of democratic capitalism: to love one’s neighbor as oneself.92 If Americans learn from Sufis how to personally strive for God as well as worldly goods, they can moderate America’s excesses without sacrificing its abundance. They can then serve as global models of religious and economic achievement. For Rauf, Sufi practice helps Muslims fulfill what he describes as Islam’s requirement to “value community over individualism” and to assume “responsibility to help others through charity and other acts.”93 This emphasis on charity and community might initially appear to contradict the emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance (rather than reliance on government programs) that is a hallmark of neoliberal philosophies. In reading Rauf ’s account more closely, though, the compatibility of his religio-economic model with neoliberal prescriptions becomes more apparent. Comparisons with Gingrich are again instructive. Gingrich extols America’s exceptional history of voluntarism, including that of Catholics whose “private generosity” provides assistance for those in distress.94 For him, social cohesion and many social services should come from voluntary associations rather than from government programs. “The American revolutionaries did not shed their blood for the welfare state,” he argues.95 Quoting Novak in his section on “Civil Society,” Gingrich advocates reviving the habits of the first settlers, who “took pride in being free persons, independent and self-reliant,” but who structured their individual lives in ways that were “cooperative and fraternal.”96 For his part, Novak once argued that American capitalism—particularly as moderated by the New Deal legislation Catholic bishops helped inspire—provides the best practical means for “raising the wealth of nations,” thereby bettering the lives of the poor and needy as Catholic teachings demand.97 In these models, religious institutions, endowed with the voluntary contributions of their members, serve a crucial role in maintaining a free market society’s social fabric. Once very basic safeguards are in place, faith-based striving for individual and communal benefit enables economic privatization and limited government. Although approving of some regulation—such as prohibitions on child labor98—Rauf also makes a case for the need to prevent governmental overreach. In this argument, corporations are again crucial. Echoing Novak, Rauf



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describes corporations as examples of separated powers and as checks against economic centralization.99 This promotion of corporations undermines the praise he gives to Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt, however, and to their checks on capitalist excess. Moreover, he fails to address the repeal of much New Deal economic regulation during the 1970s and 1980s conservative backlash (led by Novak and his colleagues) against Roosevelt- and Johnson-era social programs. As a result, Rauf ’s economic philosophy resembles that of the neoliberals from whom he derives the term “democratic capitalism” more than it does Church’s or that of other religious leaders on the left with whom many pundits, journalists, and conservative politicians associate him. Rauf ’s philosophical closeness to Gingrich and Novak is especially noticeable when he explains the role of the “business community” in fostering rapprochement between Muslims and the West. Because economic prosperity will undercut the appeal of violence in impoverished conflict areas, Rauf maintains in an argument he frequently made during his yearly trips to the World Economic Forum, business elites must extend their enterprises around the world so as to create economic opportunities.100 Once the profit motive and desire to “maximize” one’s own “payoff ” are structured into society, Rauf argues, most people will recognize the benefits of mutual cooperation under democratic governance—even if not compelled by religious ethics.101 The final point of similarity between Gingrich’s economic philosophy and Rauf ’s concerns the role of charity in helping immigrants—often religious ­minorities—assimilate. Both men believe immigrants Americanize, in part, by creating voluntary institutions to provide the social and moral supports free market systems otherwise lack. For Gingrich, such charities are an example of the kind of “private virtue” that the Founders intended for civil society— something undermined when the state provides services.102 In his version of history, the primary obstacle to progress is not economic inequality or racial discrimination, past or present, it is governmental overreach cultivating an indolent population. Rauf ’s position on charity is more complicated—less overtly partisan but, ultimately, quite close to Gingrich’s neoliberal position. In order to see the similarities, it is necessary to examine how Rauf translates the Islamic tradition of zakat and the importance he gives charity in his narrative of immigrant assimilation. Most of Rauf ’s discussion of charity occurs in the course of his effort to explain the Islamic tradition of zakat—the annual giving of a portion of one’s wealth, generally to the needy, that is one of the Five Pillars of Islamic prac-

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tice. While some Muslims describe zakat as a “right” the poor can demand and translate other giving traditions (such as the voluntary practice of sadaqa) as “charity,” Rauf does not use this terminology.103 Instead, he is more ambiguous. Rauf does describe zakat as a “tax” at one point.104 He does not end his explanation with this analogy to state income redistribution, however. In the rest of the narrative, before and after this section, zakat is charity.105 When Rauf does describe it as a tax, he acknowledges that associating zakat—a religious obligation—with the government could be seen as violating the separation of church and state. Rauf ends the discussion of zakat-as-tax on this note, implying that religious responsibilities to provide for the poor are distinct from proper government functions. He later connects charity to Sufism, describing it and the other Five Pillars of Islam as forms of the Sufi ritual of remembering God (dhikr) in every action.106 Not only does Rauf describe zakat as more like US Protestant traditions of private charity than of taxation, he describes charities and other social institutions as things immigrants create while adopting the Protestant ethic and assimilating into the middle class. Rauf briefly acknowledges that up to 40 percent of Muslims—mostly, but not exclusively, black Americans—have a very different “sociological” experience in the United States, something he describes elsewhere as additional proof of American upward mobility and liberal promise, as I discuss in Chapter 4. Regardless of the fact that the lives of nearly half of American Muslims—many of whom have lived in the United States for generations—do not fit his template, Rauf then proceeds to treat what he describes as the immigrant ethical and economic Americanization process as a normative one and as a guarantee of eventual Muslim acceptance.107 Importantly, social acceptance is not the only goal. Once fully Americanized, US Muslims can serve as mediators between Islam and the West— just as Irish Catholics (also once the targets of discrimination and violence) Americanized by creating charities, private “welfare agencies,” and other social institutions that helped later Catholic immigrants assimilate, and ultimately— according to Rauf—helped change world Catholicism through their influence on Vatican II.108 Jewish immigrants followed a similar pattern of Americanization, he argues, “adopt[ing] key aspects of the Puritan and Abrahamic ethic” and creating civic and social institutions that served their communities while respecting the separation of church and state.109 Eventually, Jewish Americanization had a similarly transformative effect, Rauf maintains, changing the contours of world Judaism while also turning the Protestant-dominated United



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States into a Judeo-Christian nation. In Rauf ’s account, this historical process will be complete when Muslims become more American and when other Americans recognize that Protestant-turned-Judeo-Christian ethics are, and always were, Abrahamic ones. These histories of creating service organizations are ones Rauf, like Gingrich, celebrates as proof of intentional immigrant assimilation into a free market society with limited social provisions. In his 2004 book, Rauf does not wed such private service provision to a neoliberal agenda as explicitly as Gingrich does. Nevertheless, during and after the 2010 backlash against Cordoba House—a time coinciding with the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression—Rauf and Daisy Khan increasingly stressed community service to demonstrate American belonging. Their efforts mirrored something occurring more broadly in American Muslim communities at the time: an attempt to demonstrate that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, supports voluntarism, community engagement, and caring for the needs of less fortunate members of society. These values and traditions have long histories in Muslim-majority contexts, of course. The framing of such traditions as charity, however, and even more specifically as “service,” as Khan described it during a television interview on ABC, is an American phenomenon—one that has taken on new meanings since the 2007 economic recession and, as I discuss in Chapter 7 of this book, the 2008 election of the nation’s first black—and, according to many conservatives, “Muslim” and “socialist”—president. “All religions Americanize over time,” Khan told reporter Christiane Amanpour in an August 2010 episode of This Week. “They go from a place of worship to a place of service, and community centers have been developed by Christian communities like the YMCA, and the Jewish community has developed the JCC. And [the] Muslim community is inevitably going to also develop such a center.” 110 Khan’s narrative of Americanization is also modeled on Herberg’s paradigm of immigrant upward mobility and progressive assimilation. One crucial exception is that Khan (like Rauf, from whom she borrows) omits Herberg’s critique. While Herberg described immigrant assimilation to the “American way of life” as a process of, in part, religious decline into material decadence, Rauf describes it as ethically ideal. This difference, one Rauf acknowledges, again reveals how his account replicates those of earlier religious minorities who fought for inclusion by adapting dominant white Protestants’ narratives of meritocracy and moral exceptionalism. It also exposes a kind of Protestant-derived secularism that still places

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t­remendous pressures on such minorities to translate their traditions in its terms. Rauf gave evidence of this when addressing Herberg’s criticism: The American way of life is individualistic, dynamic, pragmatic, affirming the supreme value and dignity of the individual, who is striving to get ahead and wants to be judged by achievement: deeds are what count. Although some see in this American horizontal dimension of religion a kind of secularized Puritansim, a creed shaped by American Protestantism, we can equally assert that at its core this expresses the Abrahamic, and equally the Islamic, ethic.111

Traditions in Translation: Protestant-Secular Pressures and Narrative Transformation Rauf ’s promotion of common ethics, liberal rights, and liberal markets, as well as his years as a cultural ambassador on behalf of the State Department, might seem to instantiate the case anthropologist Saba Mahmood has made about post-9/11 US government projects to change Muslims’ interpretations and practices. In a 2006 essay describing National Security Council efforts to foster modes of Islamic education that will make Muslims more “open to a ‘Western vision of civilization, political order, and society,’” Mahmood criticized both the neo-imperialist projects she identified and the “moderate” Muslim spokespersons involved in them.112 She argued that such projects attempt to reformulate the relationship between Islam and politics by teaching Muslims to view the Qur’an and other texts as products of culture and history. The hope is that rituals, scriptures, laws, and observances will come to be regarded as symbolic in importance rather than “literal,” as they are for “fundamentalists” and “traditionalists.”113 Muslims educated in this manner—like those liberals who are committed to the “poetic resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition” rather than to “traditional authority”—will avoid confusing religious symbols with universal truth and will, in turn, become amenable to liberal, secular political rule.114 While Mahmood’s analysis is important to my own, mine departs from hers in significant ways. In terms of historical scope, Mahmood described American-led projects “to foster what is now broadly called ‘moderate Islam’” as a post-9/11 phenomenon. In contrast, as I have elsewhere demonstrated and discuss briefly in Chapter 2, Americans have led projects to foster “moderate” (and, before that, “modern”) Islam since the Eisenhower administration.115



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These projects did not take shape in response to 9/11 and as part of the War on Terror but are the outgrowth of much older efforts to cultivate Muslim allies. More importantly, in contrast to Mahmood’s depiction of US projects to moderate Islam and of the Muslim intellectuals allied with them—whom she describes as uniformly committed to liberalizing Qur’anic interpretation and making liturgy, scripture, and ritual “inessential,” thereby contributing to colonial and neo-colonial endeavors to wrest power from traditional authorities116—Rauf and his colleagues argue that Muslims must become “modern” and “moderate” while adhering to Islamic legal, scriptural, and ritual traditions in more than simply symbolic ways. They emphasize shared religious traditions—including and especially ethical ones such as charity that, they argue, mandate neoliberal political and economic frameworks—but also simultaneously challenge the privatized, individual approaches to piety that Mahmood cites as the goal of such projects.117 Consequently, while Mahmood believes that the “particular understanding of secularism underlying contemporary American discourses on Islam” is overwhelmingly influenced by US foreign policy concerns and distinguishes it from the religiously informed kinds of secularism that shape American life and American citizen-subjects domestically,118 I show that these discourses cannot be disentangled. In point of fact, Rauf ’s emphasis on voluntarism and translation of zakat primarily as “charity” rather than as “tax” reflects the historic struggles against Protestant-dominated American secular arrangements—ones which motivated many Catholics, Jews, and other minorities to create institutions to educate their children privately (rather than in Protestant-dominated, state-funded public schools) and to create mutual aid societies that would afford religious minorities social services without the liberal Protestant paternalism that often marked Progressive Era social service campaigns.119 Finally, while Mahmood implies that liberal interpretations of the “JudeoChristian tradition” are the template US officials use in their efforts to moderate Muslims, thus collapsing with her terminology the differences between and among various Jews and Christians and ignoring the American political history of that comparatively recent coalitional term, my analysis highlights the continually contested claims dominant Protestants and religious minorities (including dissenting Protestants) have made about their traditions and about the nation’s identity. In Chapter 2, I discuss further some of the ways religious and racial minorities have attempted to translate their traditions in terms of dominant white Protestant ones, focusing particularly on Muslims of

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various ethnicities (including Rauf ’s father) who emphasized service and antisocialism out of sincere conviction as well as from the desire to gain social acceptance and recognition, sometimes at the expense of other Muslim communities. This translation process is far from finished, meaning that not even the creation of “Judeo-Christian” identity is a fait accompli. Rather, it is the occasional precariousness of Jewish, Catholic, and minority Protestant status that—while optimistically omitted from Rauf ’s history—heightens the stakes of American Muslims’ struggles for inclusion.

2 S E RVI CE, ANTI-SO C IA L IS M, AND CO NTESTS TO REP R E S E NT AMERI CAN MUSL IMS

AT T H E E N D O F 196 5 , a year marked by struggles for civil rights and over the war in Vietnam, Feisal Abdul Rauf first set foot on American shores. Nearly forty years later, Rauf described this event in nostalgic terms—the tale of an immigrant searching for spiritual and material fulfillment in the promised land— rather than in terms of the racial and religious tumult that marked that decade of American history. “As I sailed into New York on the cold wintry morning of December 22, 1965, on the Italian SS Michelangelo, I beheld the Statue of Liberty and wondered what America had in store for me,” he wrote in 2004. “Little did I realize then that I was to discover the riches of my faith tradition in this land. Like many immigrants from Muslim lands, I discovered my Islam in America.”1 As noted in Chapter 1, Rauf describes the Islam he discovered in the United States as consistent with what Will Herberg called the “American way of life.” For Herberg, the ethnic and national markers of white immigrants melt away by the third generation, leaving behind only religious affiliations (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish). Different as these religions may sometimes be, assimilation ultimately makes their adherents uniformly devoted to political, economic, and religious democracy and to a “robust faith in idealism, activism, and moral conviction.”2 Identifying as Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, Herberg insisted, are simply different ways of identifying as American. Reworking this assimilation model during the decade after 9/11, Rauf recast it—combining it with Michael Novak’s anti-socialist writings and dismissing Herberg’s critique of American decadence—to foretell the development of a moderate American Islam.

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Rauf consistently presented his own work of teaching Muslims to be socially and spiritually responsible, to strive for the here and the hereafter— which meant, among other things, prospering economically in order to engage in private charity and community service—as central to Americanization. Further, he wedded such advancement to Sufism, a form of the kind of piety that is, he finds, essential to making America as ethical as it is affluent. For him, Sufi striving will help Muslim immigrants achieve middle class moderation and integration just as spiritual and economic striving helped integrate religious and racial minorities before them. It is not surprising that Rauf relies so heavily on Herberg’s story of white immigrant assimilation. When Rauf ’s father, Muhammad, accepted a job that moved the family from their home in Malaysia to the United States, the previously unthinkable election of a Catholic president was already old news. By 1965, Kennedy’s tenure was a matter to memorialize rather than an ongoing controversy. Arriving in New York as a seventeen-year-old that year, Rauf had missed debates over whether Kennedy’s Catholicism made him unsuitable to serve in office and over the appropriateness of Kennedy’s Peace Corps for overseas civilian service, an initiative that had occasioned one of the greatest revivals of anti-Catholic sentiment among Protestants since the nineteenth century.3 The religious tensions Rauf did notice in the United States had to do with Muslims. In 1967, Israel and Egypt went to war, and the ripple effects of the conflict were felt keenly in New York, where Rauf and other Columbia University students discussed the issue in their classes, and where Rauf ’s father attempted to engage Jewish leaders in dialogue. For Rauf, Kennedy’s presidency was evidence of Catholic inclusion in Protestant power structures. Similarly, US support of Israel seemed proof of Jewish acceptance in America, making Herberg’s tale of white Judeo-Christian progress appear unproblematic. Focusing his narrative primarily on immigrant Muslims rather than black ­Americans—whose marginalization, despite their religiosity, also troubled Herberg’s account—Rauf described Americanization as a mostly seamless process of acculturation. As I discuss in this chapter, neither interreligious nor interracial equality was as established during the latter part of the twentieth century as Rauf suggested. The selective history of assimilation through service and volunteerism that Rauf (like other Muslim American leaders) presents as proof of America’s multicultural, multireligious promise is not altogether inaccurate. Members of marginalized Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish populations created many volun-



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tary organizations during the twentieth century. These organizations, initially established to serve the needs of particular religious populations, later offered services to other communities while attempting to prove that their members contributed to the nation as much as white mainline Protestants did. As I have elsewhere discussed, however, creating service organizations gained marginalized groups only selective tolerance, earning them more acceptance from the federal government—with various presidential administrations often seeking to co-opt their work—than from fellow citizens. This was the case not just for Catholics and Jews, as the controversy over Kennedy’s Peace Corps service program (among other things) demonstrated, but also for Muslims. Although not mentioned in Rauf ’s 2004 book, Muslim Americans had created voluntary organizations and engaged in various service endeavors throughout the twentieth century, but with mixed results regarding the social acceptance they desired. Like Catholic and Jewish American organizations, fledgling Muslim American organizations frequently faced government cooptation and popular discrimination simultaneously, their fates linked to the vagaries of international developments and American foreign policy. Also like Catholic and Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans are a highly diverse constituency, politically, economically, ethnically, and racially. Different segments of the Muslim American population faced different levels of acceptance and discrimination, and racial differences among Muslims often translated into social disparities, especially after 1965 when both black and immigrant Muslim American groups contended for social acceptance and governmental recognition. As changes in immigration law spurred the growth of Arab and South Asian Muslim communities in the United States, and as leaders of the formerly separatist Nation of Islam sought greater social acceptance, members of these various communities—including Rauf ’s father—competed with each other to define Islam for American audiences and to portray their own particular practices as most in keeping with the values of democracy, capitalism, and service. Tensions resulting from these contests reached a zenith during the late 1970s era of hostage crises—Iranian and otherwise—and contributed to Abdul-Rauf ’s removal from a prestigious position and return to Malaysia. Similar tensions, compounded over time, reemerged in the twenty-first century as scrutiny of Muslims after 9/11 intensified various groups’ attempts to prove their national loyalties and “moderation” and gave rise to both new professions of common ethics (including the civic ethic of community service) and new, racialized arguments against socialism.

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Black and White Muslims in Pursuit of Equal Citizenship Like the white ethnic Catholics and Jews discussed in Chapter 1, many white ethnic Muslims—those whose parents or grandparents hailed from Eastern ­Europe, Turkey, or the Levant and who were often classified as “white” in census records—benefited from GI Bill provisions and experienced upward mobility after World War II. While Muslim Americans were omitted from narratives of Judeo-Christian heritage during that conflict, postwar foreign policy issues seemed to provide them with ample opportunities to gain inclusion and prove their loyalties through various kinds of service. With the beginnings of a new “cold” war between the United States and the Soviet Union, in particular, American political and business leaders looked to Muslim communities to serve as foreign emissaries. This recruiting effort coincided with a growing trend of coalition building among Muslim Americans and a growing desire to have their contributions to the nation recognized. President Eisenhower, who was focused on stemming the influence of communism in the Middle East (and, following Roosevelt, on securing alliances with Saudi Arabia and access to Persian Gulf oil), was prepared to do just that.4 In 1957, Eisenhower, expounding what later became known as the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” promised to protect the Middle East from communism. That same year, his Operations Coordinating Board (OCB, established in 1953 to replace Truman’s agency for intelligence and psychological warfare) released a classified report on how to make Muslim allies, titled Inventory of U.S. Government and Private Organization Activity Regarding Islamic Organizations as an Aspect of Overseas Operations.5 The OCB report illuminates the administration’s approach to creating Muslim allies: a two-pronged strategy involving foreign intelligence and intervention, as well as domestic surveillance and promotion. The former task generally included a combination of economic incentives and diplomatic pressure that, to be successful, required extensive analysis of South Asia and the Middle East. When changes in immigration restrictions (the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952) allowed students from the Middle East and Palestinian refugees greater entry to the United States than previously, many immigrants found positions in institutes newly established for the study of Mideast politics. Meanwhile, in a turn of good fortune for the Eisenhower administration, second-generation Muslim Americans who had created national coalitions during and after World War II were seeking ways to foster social acceptance and garner governmental recognition.



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In 1952, hundreds of Muslim Americans gathered for the first convention of the International Muslim Society (renamed the Federation of Islamic Associations of the US and Canada, or FIA, in 1954). The founder of this umbrella organization for American Muslim groups, Abdallah Igram (a second-­generation Muslim American of Arab descent), was aggrieved by misrepresentations of Islam he had encountered during his service in World War II and was devoted to changing his fellow Americans’ perceptions of the tradition. In 1953, the year after Eisenhower famously identified the Judeo-Christian tradition as the “deeply felt religious faith” on which the US government is based, Igram successfully petitioned the president for an Islamic symbol to use on the identification tags of Muslims in the military.6 He and other FIA leaders then sought further opportunities to build connections with political elites. During the following decade, FIA representatives traveled to Cairo to, among other things, fulfill part of FIA’s original mission of serving as intermediaries between Muslim-majority countries and the United States. Staff of both the US embassy and the Egyptian government greeted the delegates when they arrived.7 In 1957, Eisenhower seized another opportunity to create Middle East alliances and cultivate domestic Muslim populations when he inaugurated the Islamic Center of Washington, DC.8 On June 28, just five years after extolling the Judeo-Christian tradition, Eisenhower stood amid the tiles from Turkey, chandeliers from Egypt, and carpets from Iran and praised both Islamic culture and the common values Muslims and Americans share. “The countries which have sponsored and built this Islamic Center have for centuries contributed to the building of civilization. With their traditions of learning and rich culture, the countries of Islam have added much to the advancement of mankind. Inspired by a sense of brotherhood, common to our inner most beliefs, we can here together reaffirm our determination to secure the foundation of a just and lasting peace.”9 Eisenhower’s words could easily have come from that year’s OCB report, which stressed the “common spiritual base” of Islam and Christianity and their common “spiritual and ethical values.”10 The report’s stated reasons for Islam’s importance to the United States included that Muslim-majority states were members of the United Nations and that communists sought to exploit Islam.11 Consequently, the OCB concluded, Americans needed to burnish their reputation in Islamic countries and initiate more “regional studies . . . in the order of Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.”12 The following year, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, thus providing funding for studies of both religion and politics in these regions

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and helping to foster interest in Islam. As the OCB knew and mentioned, privately funded institutes dedicated to such research already existed at a number of universities in North America. In fact, it was Isma‘il al-Faruqi, a Rockefeller Fellow specializing in comparative ethics at McGill University in Montreal, who would help popularize a new vocabulary of religious commonality in the United States—that of “Abrahamic” cohesion—and help set the stage for presenting common ethics, service, and anti-socialism as the basis for Muslim belonging. Although some Muslim Americans seemed poised to benefit from the opportunities to build political alliances at the end of the 1950s, a number of developments that unfolded during the second half of the twentieth century complicated their efforts. Even as white ethnic Muslims sought, through various kinds of service (military, diplomatic, and otherwise), to have their contributions recognized in Judeo-Christian America, some black American Muslims drew attention for their very different opinions about the relationship between Islam and the United States. Additionally, changes in US immigration law profoundly transformed the demographic and political composition of Muslim communities—and of America more broadly—in the next decades, while domestic and foreign policy concerns shifted both the attitudes of public officials and public opinion about Muslims. During these tumultuous times, Muslim Americans of different ethnic and racial backgrounds—including Rauf ’s father—sometimes worked cooperatively to improve the image of Islam in the United States and improve attitudes toward Muslims. Perhaps more frequently, as I discuss below, they worked at cross-purposes, with different communities lobbying to have their own practices and traditions considered the most authentically Islamic and least subversive—in other words, the least “militant” and the least socialist.

American Muslims in the “Great Society”: From Alliances to Antagonisms During the 1960s and 1970s, American ideas about so-called militant Muslims changed in keeping with developments that seemed to challenge dominant US interests. Black American Muslims were cast as aggressive and violent in the 1960s, thanks to FBI surveillance and disinformation campaigns and to a 1959 television special that introduced the Nation of Islam to other Americans: Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax’s The Hate that Hate Produced, which



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prompted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to denounce the Nation of Islam as a hate group. In contrast, by the end of the 1970s—a decade in which wars and revolutions rocked the Middle East and Palestinian terrorist attacks reached across Europe—the images of militant Muslims most commonly evoked by the media were no longer domestic but foreign, no longer black but Arab and Iranian.13 Throughout these years and in response to each new development, Muslim American communities attempted to make alliances across difference and to build relations with political leaders. In the early 1960s, most Americans hearing the term “black Muslim” thought of Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam’s most prominent spokesperson, and their thoughts about him were not positive. Although over a dozen black American Sunni communities existed in urban centers throughout the country in the 1960s, the Nation of Islam (NOI)—a group increasingly rejected by domestic Sunni congregations after the 1959 TV special—was the largest black American Muslim movement and also the most connected to pan-Islamic nationalist movements in the Middle East.14 These connections, along with Malcolm X’s visits with communist leaders such as Fidel Castro at the United Nations, unnerved American intelligence agents and governmental officials. Additionally, the NOI—and Malcolm X, in particular—served as a counter­ example in most mainstream media of harmonious interracial and inter­ religious engagement. As public suspicion of Catholics involved in the Peace Corps shook Kennedy’s administration, the Catholic president put his political weight behind Jews and Christians allied in the South in the fight against racial discrimination. Growing black American interest in Islam (NOI and otherwise) seemed to many to threaten the interreligious and interracial cooperation forged through these bloody civil rights struggles. In February 1963, for example, the New York Times ran an article on a Chicago NOI rally under the headline “Muslims Press Race Separation.” The article mainly quoted Malcolm X, who petitioned the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality to join forces with the NOI against integration.15 Then, at the end of that year— after Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway, four little girls lost their lives in a Birmingham church bombing, and the United States helped assassinate the first democratically elected Congolese prime minister, Patrice L ­ umumba—Malcolm X described Kennedy’s death as a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”16 NOI leader Elijah Muhammad censured him and apologized to the Kennedy family in an attempt to save the Nation’s

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image. Nevertheless, the NOI was marginalized and excoriated by not only non-­Muslim Americans but also the country’s growing black, immigrant, and established white-ethnic Sunni groups.17 The years 1964 and 1965 witnessed a remaking of Malcolm’s image, if not yet the stereotype of black Muslims, that would have profound effects on interracial and interreligious relations by the end of the decade. After disaffiliating from the NOI and transitioning to Sunni Islam—a process that involved undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca and writing about his new belief in racial reconciliation—Malcolm X (now El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. He also founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (modeled on the Organization of African Unity), continued to criticize US domestic and foreign policy, and urged transnational alliances to effect global human rights for all non-white persons.18 Such appeals increasingly resonated with black Americans, particularly after Malcolm’s assassination in 1965 and the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., which occurred just as tides of PanAfrican, Black Power, and anticolonial sentiments crested in the United States. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war, coming in the midst of these cultural shifts and followed by a 1973 conflict, caused some black Americans to view Israel as a colonial power. This political change, in turn, contributed to weakening the civil rights era goodwill forged between some Jewish and black Americans and to distancing black American Muslims from some sectors of the political establishment. Further, not only did the wars help consolidate many Jewish Americans’ attachments to Israel, they intensified the affections of evangelicals who believe Israel has a role in apocalyptic prophecies and of a new branch of conservatives (“neoconservatives”) who saw Israel’s military victories over Arabs in the 1970s as instructive for the American military after its demoralizing failure in Vietnam.19 Although the 1967 and 1973 wars were far from the only factors responsible for spreading Black Power sentiments, Pan-Africanism, and anticolonialism among black Americans, both black American Christians and Jewish Americans later blamed Muslims for souring black-Jewish relations.20 These 1960s upheavals in Catholic-Protestant relations and in black ­Christian-Jewish relations were not entirely evident to newly arriving immigrants such as Muhammad Abdul-Rauf and his family. Whether or not AbdulRauf knew that his overtures toward Jewish congregations coincided with a decline in black-Jewish relations, particularly in urban environments, cannot be determined. What is certain is that the shifting domestic and transnational



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race relations completely flummoxed young Feisal. By the time Rauf ’s family sailed into New York harbor, President Lyndon Johnson had already delivered his most notable public address on the floor of Congress: an address in which he had adopted the refrain of the Civil Rights movement—“we shall overcome”—as his own. Moreover, Johnson had pushed through Kennedy’s civil rights legislation, signed an additional civil rights bill (the Voting Rights Act of 1965), and begun to create affirmative action programs that, he hoped, would remedy some of the effects of centuries of social, economic, and physical oppression on black Americans. Not recognizing that the cost of the Vietnam War, combined with a sharp rightward tilt in the Republican Party during the 1960s, undermined both Roosevelt’s financial regulations and Johnson’s social welfare legislation,21 Rauf later extolled the effectiveness of both presidents’ programs in creating an ethical and equitable free market and in effecting racial uplift, and confessed his bemusement at seeing college students sympathize with anti-capitalist revolutionaries and “third-world” politics in the 1960s. As Rauf recalled, he had grown up in Malaysia, “listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here [to New York], I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World. I understood their anger about the draft and the Vietnam War, but their talking and singing about revolution and idolizing Che Guevara and Fidel Castro made no sense to me.”22 The 1970s were nearly as tumultuous as the 1960s for American Muslims but in different ways. By the middle of the decade, as Republican backlash against Johnson’s Great Society programs and against multiculturalism intensified, fiscal conservatives and city officials across the country came to praise the NOI as an example of the kind of religion that black Americans needed—one that advocated economic advancement through self-reliance rather than government assistance. With his thriving business ventures, theology of thrift, and emphasis on self-reliance, Elijah Muhammad caught the attention of conservatives who opposed Johnson’s social programs. Beginning in the late 1960s, neoconservatives such as Nathaniel Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Michael Novak— the children of Jewish and Catholic immigrants—applauded the religious and ethnic communities that, they believed, had risen economically by dint of their own resourcefulness rather than via the path of government assistance. The NOI appeared to be one such group and, in fact, likely resembled their model of self-reliance more than did any of the white ethnic populations that had benefited from Social Security and the GI Bill. Consequently, commendations

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of the NOI quickly turned into something of a trend.23 Not long after, the NOI changed profoundly, with many members renouncing their separatism. In the meantime, American politicians and much of the press reacted to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and subsequent oil crisis—brought about when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised prices in response to the war—by depicting Arabs as terrorists who held America’s gasoline hostage.24 Actual hostage crises only exacerbated these stereotypes by the end of the decade. When, after his son’s graduation from Columbia, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf accepted a post as director of the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, he found himself in the midst of these shifting dynamics, sometimes cooperating with black American Muslims whom politicians and pundits celebrated and sometimes competing with them for representation and acceptance. With controversy over Johnson’s immigration and affirmative action programs intensifying and Cold War tensions mounting, high-profile immigrant and black American Muslim leaders began to express American belonging by extolling free-market capitalism as much as by emphasizing community and social service. Additionally, they allowed conservatives to read their encouragement of free enterprise and community-mindedness as promotion of reduced welfare provisions within an aggressively capitalist environment. This was true both of recent immigrants such as Muhammad Abdul-Rauf and of the once notorious black American Muslim leader, Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad encouraged the shifting public perceptions of the Nation of Islam during an era marked by what some historians describe as the beginning of the “Great Divergence” in economic standing between the increasingly rich and the increasingly poor. Democrats at the time offered little resistance to Republicans who sought to undermine progressive legislation of the Johnson and Roosevelt eras. Notably, the shifting economic tide was not simply a result of partisan politics but something Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton also later encouraged by deregulating major industries and dismantling some legislation.25 During his last public appearance, in 1974, ­Elijah Muhammad delivered a message of self-help that echoed the neoconservatives’ and neoliberals’ creed. The “slave master is no longer hindering us,” he claimed, “we’re hindering ourselves. The slave master has given you all he could give you. He gave you freedom. Now get something for yourself.”26 The solution was not to seek government assistance but to engage in individual and community uplift, and for such sentiments both Republicans and Democrats applauded him.



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After Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley lauded him as a public servant. “Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam has been a consistent contributor to the social well-being of our city for more than 40 years,” Daley said.27 Earlier that year, Mayor Thomas Bradley of Los Angeles proclaimed February 4 “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad Day,” and even the New York Times—which had criticized the NOI’s “race separatism”—praised the organization’s public service, crediting it with “rehabilitating and inspiring thousands of once defeated and despairing men and women.”28 The social and religious acceptability of the organization only increased with the changes Muhammad’s son, W. D. Mohammed, implemented after his father’s death. These included incorporating Sunni traditions into NOI frameworks while keeping his father’s focus on entrepreneurialism. They also included numerous name changes. The Nation of Islam was retitled “The World Community of Al-Islam in the West” and the organization’s “temples” became “mosques.”29 Additionally, Mohammed changed the name of the group’s annual February gatherings honoring the birth of NOI founder W. D. Fard from “Savior’s Day” celebrations to “Survival Day” (later, “Ethnic Survival Day”) celebrations.30 This shift not only downplayed previous NOI claims about Fard’s divinity (which clashed with Sunni tenets) but also stressed what all black Americans had in common: a history of surviving slavery, the violence and repression that characterized Jim Crow laws, and the ongoing resistance to civil rights. Further, Mohammed promoted the cohesion of all Americans by flying the American flag during the Savior’s Day celebrations in 1976 coinciding with the US bicentennial. Despite the largely positive attention these changes garnered, black American Muslim leaders did not begin to enjoy real political clout until the 1990s. Prior to that, their influence was reduced both by occasional negative publicity, such as that resulting from a late 1970s hostage taking in Washington, DC, and by the efforts of recent immigrants—including Muhammad Abdul-Rauf—to serve as spokespersons for all Muslims during the era of oil, Arab-Israeli, and American-Iranian crises.

American Muslim Allies and Competitors in the Arena of Public Opinion From the late 1970s through the beginning of the twenty-first century, competition for governmental recognition and social acceptance did as much to sour intra-Muslim relations as did economic disparities or conflicts over religious

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authority.31 Such competition was often shot through with contests over religious authority, and it often had economic components, although not just in the racialized class-conflict terms that some have suggested. As we shall see in what follows, despite the severe financial and social challenges many black communities faced, black American Muslim leaders could be as vocal as immigrant Muslim leaders in extolling American free-market capitalism so as to demonstrate their national bona fides. This was increasingly the case during the late 1970s and early 1980s era of hostage crises, when all Muslims in the US felt pressed to protect their public image, and competition for acceptance helped turn intra-Muslim alliances into antagonism. Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, who had attempted to establish positive ties with the Nation of Islam long before the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles lauded Elijah Muhammad, was important in both building and straining black-­ immigrant Muslim relations. Occupying a quasi-diplomatic post as head of the Islamic Center of New York (home to many U.N. ambassadors) and, later, of the influential Islamic Center in Washington, DC, Abdul-Rauf served at the behest of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, which had dispatched him to America at a time when the Egyptian government oversaw Al-Azhar’s appointments of religious officials. The Egyptian government also had a history of making common cause with the NOI—something Abdul-Rauf continued once settled in the United States. Significantly, although the NOI had forged ties with the Egyptian government as early as the 1950s, it later also established connections to some of Egypt’s Mideast rivals (specifically, oil rich Sunni monarchies).32 During Abdul-Rauf ’s time in the States, it even seemed that Egypt might be losing the NOI’s allegiance. While serving partly as an Egyptian functionary, Abdul-Rauf often went to extraordinary lengths to show support for the NOI, even defending the organization after its members had an altercation with New York City police that led to the death of one officer.33 Abdul-Rauf ’s efforts to maintain ties with the NOI sometimes earned him the ire of other Muslim communities in the United States—particularly black American Sunni groups such as the Islamic Party of North America, which disapproved of what it saw as the NOI’s heterodoxy. What his Sunni critics may not have recognized was that Abdul-Rauf ’s backing of the NOI—in addition to aligning with the interests of the Egyptian state and coinciding with the praise showered on the organization by US pundits and politicians—allowed him to address issues of orthodoxy by subtly promoting among NOI members a particular vision of proper Islamic practice and intra-Muslim relations. This vision



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included close connections between various Sunni communities and leadership opportunities for humble and modest black American Muslims. Yet it also appears to have hinged on black American Muslims submitting to the overall direction of Arab spokespersons—something neither W. D. Mohammed nor other high-ranking black American Muslims could accept. In 1977, two years after W. D. Mohammed assumed leadership of and reorganized the NOI—among other things, changing the name of the organization’s newspaper from Muhammad Speaks, after Elijah Muhammad, to Bilalian News, after the second convert to Islam, a black former slave named Bilal— Abdul-Rauf published a book designed to reach black American audiences. His Bilal Ibn Rabah: A Leading Companion of the Prophet Muhammad traced the life of the historical figure who had served as the first Islamic prayer leader. Abdul-Rauf wrote the book at the request of “one of my dear brothers, Karim ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, a leading figure in the energetic movement of the Nation of Islam in North America.”34 The body of the work is mainly historical, but in AbdulRauf ’s preface and conclusion one can glean the kind of example he thought Bilal could be for black Americans. The word Abdul-Rauf used most frequently to describe Bilal was “modest.” Abdul-Rauf prefaced his account by stressing that Bilal “preferred to assume a marginal role, and never sought a prominent public office or participated in controversial issues.”35 The only portion of the book contradicting this depiction was the introduction, written by the Washington Bureau Chief of ­Bilalian News and a member of W. D. Mohammed’s movement, Ghayth Nur Kashif. Kashif praised Abdul-Rauf ’s work but set a different tone when describing Bilal’s life and relevance. Rather than stress Bilal’s humility, Kashif remarked on his “lofty ascension as the first and Chief Mua’dhdhin (caller to prayer) of the final prophet of Allah” and claimed that Bilal’s life—far from avoiding political issues—could be instructive to “Western civilization, just now emerging from the ignoble shackles of ignorance and fear, both the handmaidens of ugly racism and class distinction.”36 For Kashif, it was time for the “Bilalian Community,” as W. D. Mohammed’s followers called themselves, to assume their rightful roles of leadership and historical importance. Kashif did not have the last word when it came to Bilal on this occasion. Those words can be found in Abdul-Rauf ’s conclusion. Seeming to agree with Kashif, Abdul-Rauf wrote there that the “life story of our hero Bilal can be a source of tremendous inspiration for the world of Islam today, particularly the members of the Muslim community of twentieth-century America.”37 Then,

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however, Abdul-Rauf reiterated his own take on Bilal’s life and on the example it should set. Even under the yoke of slavery, Bilal was a man of a responsible character, honest, sincere, and dignified . . . The more he suffered because of his faith the stronger and the more pure and solid he became. His rise to eminence after his deliverance made him humbler and nobler. No trace of arrogance could be detected in his person. Even after the death of the Prophet, he remained just as modest.38

Once again, above all else, Abdul-Rauf praised Bilal’s “striking modesty” and quiet perseverance. More significantly, he again emphasized the way Bilal deferred to Arab companions of the Prophet after Muhammad’s death rather than seek a leadership position.39 Neither W. D. Mohammed nor most other high-ranking NOI figures shared Abdul-Rauf ’s vision of black American Muslim deference. In 1978, the year after Abdul-Rauf published his book, Mohammed took steps to earn the support of governments domestic and foreign. He cemented important links to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states, which made him “the ‘sole consultant and trustee’ of their distribution of funds to Muslim missionary organizations” in the United States.40 He also took steps to emphasize patriotism, inaugurating a new holiday meant to demonstrate the transformation of former NOI members into “outstanding examples of model American citizens.”41 The title of the festival, “New World Patriotism Day,” suggested loyalty to the United States while simultaneously portraying “patriotism” as something that must be universal—a celebration of interconnectedness and equality around the world—rather than strictly national. These actions effectively rebutted Abdul-Rauf ’s intimations that black American Muslims should defer to others. They were, however, primarily undertaken to improve the image of Mohammed’s movement in the wake of another incident that tarnished its reputation: a hostage-taking in Washington, DC, in which ­Abdul-Rauf was held captive and Mohammed’s attempts to mediate the situation were rejected. In March 1977, during Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s visit to work out the basis for an Israeli-Egyptian peace accord, black American Sunnis infiltrated three sites in the nation’s capitol. Identifying as Hanafi Muslims, an NOI breakaway group, twelve gunmen took hostages at a Washington, DC, Jewish service organization, at a government building, and at the Islamic Center where Abdul-Rauf served as imam. They attacked some workers and visitors



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with knives and guns—Councilman Marion Barry was shot in the chest—then held over 120 people captive for more than a day and a half. The Hanafi hostage takers gave several reasons for their actions. One of their stated goals: to demonstrate what they saw as the danger posed by the Nation of Islam and by the Bilalian movement that succeeded it. Not only did the Hanafis warn against what they considered the NOI’s heterodoxy, they demanded retribution for what they believed to be the NOI’s role in the 1965 killing of Malcolm X and of Hanafi leader Hamaas Abdul Khaalis’ family members in a 1973 siege on Hanafi headquarters (Khaalis’ home).42 Additionally, the Hanafis voiced opposition to the budding peace accord and to America’s role in brokering it. The gunmen who stormed the Islamic Center demanded to see Abdul-Rauf and accused his country (Egypt) of conciliatory measures toward Israel.43 These Hanafi Muslims also took exception to what they perceived as Abdul-Rauf ’s liberalism. Nevertheless, their primary motivation, Khaalis claimed during a hostage-negotiation phone call, was Abdul-Rauf ’s support for the NOI-turned-World Community of Islam in the West. The multi-day crisis was finally resolved when three diplomats intervened. The Iranian, Egyptian, and Pakistani ambassadors met with Khaalis and convinced him to free the hostages and end the standoff, thus earning the praise of the FBI, intelligence officials, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who was quoted in Time magazine describing the men as “humanitarians and diplomats in the highest sense.”44 This was in stark contrast to the ways black American Muslims were depicted in accounts of the incident. When W. D. Mohammed learned of the hostage crisis, he left Chicago for DC and offered his services as a mediator. Federal negotiators rebuffed his attempts to ameliorate the situation, however, leaving him and the “Black Muslims”—as newspapers covering the incident consistently described his movement—seeming, at best, ineffectual. More frequently, the press portrayed black American Muslims as volatile (even inherently violent), fanatical, and dangerous. Despite transformations in the NOI’s image during the 1970s, cosmopolitan immigrants—Muhammad Abdul-Rauf chief among them—appeared to be eclipsing black Americans as models of both Islamic authority and American respectability and moderation. This trend might have continued if not for another hostage taking that changed how non-Muslim Americans thought about Muslims overseas and about the Muslims in their midst. During these hostage takings, economic arguments (anti-socialism, especially) became even more important for Muslims attempting to demonstrate their Americanness.

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Arguing for Islam’s compatibility with American capitalism was not the only way that the Muslim leaders discussed here asserted their Americanness at this time. When other measures faltered, however, as they did after the hostage crises and other militant actions, such claims were a valuable tool for creating distance from the specter of radicalism, foreign and domestic.

The Evolving Specter of Militancy and Anti-Socialist Claims to Inclusion As “stagflation,” or the combination of slow growth, high inflation, and high unemployment, gripped the economy in the late 1970s and President Carter attempted to reduce the government’s responsibility for social welfare—arguing in 1978 that government alone “cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities”45—religious groups in increasing numbers founded service organizations to help the needy at home and abroad. These new service organizations, like those established earlier and despite some of their criticisms of US foreign policy, frequently included patriotic military metaphors in their names: for example, Lutheran Volunteer Corps, established in 1976, as well as Mercy Volunteer Corps in 1978.46 Simultaneously, Muslim leaders in the United States, including Muhammad Abdul-Rauf and his colleague, Isma‘il al-Faruqi, attempted to improve the status of Muslims by participating in interreligious dialogues and sketching out an Islamic theology of economics. American capitalism, Abdul-Rauf and al-Faruqi argued, provides the greatest opportunities for acquiring wealth of any social system in the world and therefore most closely approximates divine mandates for political economy. Likewise seeking to regain positive recognition, W. D. Mohammed pursued similar strategies. In February 1978, Mohammed traveled to the nation’s capitol and addressed more than a thousand Jews and Muslims who had gathered for an interreligious service at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, exhorting them to recognize their commonalities. Since assuming leadership of his father’s organization, Mohammed had not only opened the movement to people of all races, he had also tried to ameliorate tensions between religious communities by visiting synagogues, churches, and college campuses.47 Then, in May 1978, Mohammed articulated a message foes of Johnson’s affirmative action programs longed to hear: that racial minorities needed to do more for themselves and to rely less on government protections and services for material needs and social advance-



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ment. “Legislation has been piling up but we haven’t been taking advantage of the opportunities open to us. The common man should not worry so much about legislation and civil rights,” he proclaimed. “If you have the ability, just go out and do what everybody else does.”48 W. D. Mohammed seemed to think that if his followers did not have the resources to enact their Americanness by providing services—he had dissolved several NOI businesses after his father’s death to reduce the organization’s debt—they could at least demonstrate their patriotism and social position by not relying on government programs. Mohammed even absolved Carter of responsibility for breaking campaign promises to aid minority populations, claiming that when Carter “got into office, he learned the realities of what he could do in light of the economy.”49 Mohammed’s statements promoting America’s ostensible economic meritocracy—welcomed as they were by politicians on both sides of the aisle—were still often met with skepticism, given the reported rifts that doctrinal changes had caused among former NOI members, as the New York Times repeatedly noted.50 In the meantime, Abdul-Rauf continued to build relations with religious and political elites. The Washington Post reported multiple times on A ­ bdul-Rauf ’s interreligious activities, covering, for example, an October 1977 meeting he held with a rabbi and a Presbyterian clergyman to emphasize Jewish-­ChristianMuslim commonality; his accreditation in the spring of 1978 as an official observer at the National Council of Churches (NCC); and a joint statement he issued the following September with the NCC, the Synagogue Council, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops urging believers to pray for the success of the Camp David talks.51 By the end of 1978, even National Geographic had taken notice of Abdul-Rauf, featuring him in an article on the Muslim pilgrimage in its magazine.52 When the Camp David Accords led to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979, the White House helped plan an interreligious service at the National Cathedral (later moved to the Lincoln Memorial) and invited Abdul-Rauf to represent Muslims. At the last minute, as Arab-led demonstrations shut down parts of the capitol in protest (the treaty did not address Palestinian refugee return), Abdul-Rauf failed to attend. His stated reason: “extreme fatigue.” Yet his office would not return calls for comment, and a leader of one of the protest groups claimed to have convinced him to avoid the service.53 While protests on the streets may well have influenced Abdul-Rauf ’s decision to bow out of the ceremonies, controversies brewing inside the Islamic Center over Abdul-Rauf ’s

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political positions were likely also a factor. These controversies would catch up with him by the end of the decade and reveal the difficulty of pleasing nonMuslim politicians and the general public while simultaneously representing a diverse religious community during a time of increased scrutiny. Pulling out of the interfaith celebrations of the Camp David Accords might have compromised Abdul-Rauf ’s efforts to build relationships with other religious and political elites had he not already begun to emphasize the religious and social supremacy of American capitalism in collaborations with the American Enterprise Institute. With Abdul-Rauf gaining increased public attention in 1977 and 1978, William J. Baroody, President of AEI, invited him to participate in an interreligious seminar devoted to demonstrating the moral superiority of capitalism over socialism. Abdul-Rauf accepted the invitation, initiating the first of many collaborations with AEI over the years. Unbeknownst to AbdulRauf, however—who admitted his lack of economics training54—the United States was about to undergo an economic transformation nearly as significant as the creation of the welfare state after the Great Depression. Five years later, when his writings were finally published, promoting American capitalism would mean a very different thing than it had in the years just after Johnson launched his Great Society and War on Poverty programs. In the foreword to Abdul-Rauf ’s A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism, Baroody described the work as a testament to the budding neoliberalism outlined by Michael Novak. In contrast to the more socially minded political liberalism of Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson who, hewing mainly to Keynesian economic theories, believed equal opportunity required a combination of market restraints and government social programs, the market-minded neoliberalism that emerged after World War II—promoted by academics like ­Friederich Hayek and adopted in the United States and Britain by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—argued for replacing centralized economic planning and Roosevelt’s economic regulations with economic liberties, private property, and personal responsibility for family and community.55 Summarizing Abdul-Rauf ’s work at the time, Baroody emphasized such themes: “Islam favors free enterprise and private ownership. The prophet encouraged increased production, trade and commerce, indicating at the same time that he favored only a limited role for the state in the regulation of trade. In addition, Islam teaches individual liberty, the right to own property, equality of opportunity (but not of wealth), equality among individuals, and the important responsibility of every Muslim male to support his family.”56



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Like other religious minorities during the Cold War, Abdul-Rauf distanced himself from communism and socialism because of what he perceived as their atheism as much as their economic principles. Like Novak, whose work he responded to, Abdul-Rauf argued that true religious practice addressed social issues and concerns while allowing maximum individual freedom. Thus, adopting greater piety was the key to balancing individual liberty and communal equality. The United States, he opined, was a God-fearing country that had crafted a basic social safety net and already emulated what Islam required for an equitable social system. “We are all familiar with the battle waged between capitalism and socialism. In spite of the appeal of its rhetoric, socialism has faded away. Its utopian dreams have proved to be an illusion . . . [American] capitalism, too, has modified itself and has welcomed some socialistic reforms within its system. It is no longer simple capitalism but democratic capitalism.”57 In his assessment of the similarities between Islamic mandates and American practices, Abdul-Rauf inserted Muslims into the narrative of Judeo-­ Christian capitalism that Novak and his colleagues had crafted in part to dispel American fears that Jews and Catholics were communist sympathizers.58 Moreover, he reiterated Novak’s criticism of sociologist Max Weber for describing modern capitalism as an “iron cage.” In contrast to the shackles Weber suggested, “democratic capitalism is open, dynamic, innovative, self-correcting, and inventive,” Abdul-Rauf echoed, and meritocratic in that it “honors hard work.”59 Therefore, Muslims could be and should be as capitalistic as other Americans. Importantly, while seizing the opportunity Novak and Baroody afforded to improve the image of Muslims in the wake of international terrorist attacks and domestic economic crises, Abdul-Rauf also made sure to note what he saw as the differences between divine mandates for political economy and the neoliberal framework Novak presented. Deviating somewhat from proponents of total market liberalism, Abdul-Rauf afforded the state a larger role than ­Baroody admitted. When Muslims are not devout enough to observe the Islamic ideal of caring for individual and society, he cautioned, discipline is required to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Checked by pious practice, personal striving could lead to increased wealth and social flourishing. But when personal piety failed, the state must intervene.60 Even in his differences with Novak and Baroody, though, Abdul-Rauf made a case for inclusion by reiterating arguments that marginalized religious groups

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had made when seeking acceptance since the beginning of the twentieth century. This was especially the case when Abdul-Rauf took exception to what Novak described as the ultimate motivations for economic action. Rather than individual liberty and happiness, as Novak—paraphrasing Locke and the nation’s founders—insisted, Abdul-Rauf described the most compelling inspiration to strive for both the here and the hereafter as “the desire to please God through service to oneself and others.”61 There is no reason to believe Abdul-Rauf was anything less than sincere when working to help Americans see Islam more sympathetically. Yet it seems unlikely that, for all his sincerity and earnestness, he failed to notice that members of marginalized religious groups fared best in the United States when they demonstrated their commitment to voluntary service and their antipathies toward socialism. Twenty years later, his son, Feisal, would echo these themes in his own book, describing them as components of “Abrahamic” ethics and connecting such striving (or jihad) to the practice of Sufism. The Abrahamic label, like the other sentiments Feisal borrowed from his father, came from another interreligious collaboration that occurred during the late 1970s—a period in which Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, if not his son, began to question the morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as the morality of what American capitalism was becoming.

Service and Anti-Socialism: The Second Generation The year after Abdul-Rauf presented Muslims as equally dedicated to service and opposed to socialism as other Americans, he joined his colleague Isma‘il al-Faruqi—a fellow graduate of Al-Azhar and the founding director of Temple University’s Islamic Studies program—at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in New York City. According to John Esposito, al-Faruqi’s first doctoral student at Temple, al-Faruqi had also fostered interreligious ties during the 1967 war and in the 1970s played a leading role representing Muslims in meetings with the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Inter-Religious Peace Colloquium (for which al-Faruqi served as vice president from 1977 to 1982), and even the Vatican, making him “a leading Muslim spokesperson for Islam” who focused not only on interreligious dialogue but also on social action.62 For the November 1979 AAR meeting, al-Faruqi invited Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders to discuss the commonalities and differences among their traditions. Rather



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than describe this as interreligious dialogue, he called it a “trialogue” of the “Abrahamic faiths.” Perhaps the invitation from al-Faruqi, a Palestinian refugee, emboldened Abdul-Rauf. Or perhaps Abdul-Rauf felt he could not represent Islam adequately unless he first addressed the frightening images flickering across American television screens that very day. In any case, although Abdul-Rauf primarily urged reconciliation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims and described the ways they shared in one true faith, he used his opening remarks to address political issues and to criticize American foreign policy—one of the few times he is recorded as doing so while living in the United States. “We meet today in a climate of tension caused by recent events in Iran,” Abdul-Rauf began, and do not “by any means advocate or even condone the practice of taking hostages as a measure of attaining legitimate aspirations.” Still, he argued, American involvement in the Middle East—including collaborating with the Shah to brutally repress Iranian protestors; cultural, political, economic, and military support for the “genocide” against Palestinians; and providing napalm and cluster bombs for use on Lebanese civilians—made it necessary to ask probing questions about American religious tolerance and religious bias, as well as about American commitment “to the so-called Judeo-Christian moral tradition.”63 This explicit political rebuke is one several members of Abdul-Rauf ’s mosque hoped he would also deliver from the minbar (similar to a pulpit or podium) of the Islamic Center in Washington, DC. There, some congregants began to perceive Abdul-Rauf as overly tolerant of American injustice and as insufficiently critical of US racism at home and abroad. Reporting in 1980 on the growing tensions between different groups at the mosque and the Islamic Center’s administration, Donnel Nunes of the Washington Post noted that some dissidents opposed Abdul-Rauf ’s silence in the face of American imperialism and of Zionist aggression against Palestinians, others (mainly black Americans) demanded action to counter domestic anti-black and anti-Islamic social trends, and still others faulted Abdul-Rauf for not supporting the Iranian Revolution. These “militants,” as Nunes described them, comprised only a small portion of the mosque’s attendees but formed a powerful constituency that threatened to overwhelm the great number of “moderates” who believed religion and politics should be separate.64 By 1980, Abdul-Rauf found it difficult to escape political controversy. Protestors at the Islamic Center demanded he stop giving weekly khutbahs (akin to sermons) at Friday prayers, and Abdul-Rauf acquiesced. By January 1981—when the resolution of the Iranian hostage crisis coincided with the end

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of Carter’s presidency and the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s (during which Michael Novak would serve as an ambassador)—Abdul-Rauf had resigned altogether and prepared to return to Malaysia.65 Before doing so, he joined al-Faruqi for one last academic gathering on the continent: a conference at the University of Alberta on “Islam in North America.”66 At that symposium, Abdul-Rauf discussed the challenge of embodying Islam when multiple cultures and constituencies lay claim to the tradition.67 His recent experiences at the Islamic Center notwithstanding, Abdul-Rauf ’s projections for the future of Muslims in North America were optimistic. Although American Muslims were “insufficiently united as to be politically effective,” Abdul-Rauf argued, he (like Herberg) saw change coming from second-generation immigrants. Partly because of the scrutiny that characterized American reactions to the Iranian Revolution, he asserted, members of his son’s cohort were seeking to equip themselves with better education, diversifying their interests in order to assert their rights and defend the honor of their heritage in the American environment. In this way, they will contribute more greatly to the glory of the country of their choice and also will be able to build better bridges of understanding and cooperation between the United States and the Islamic fatherland, creating relationships of justice and equality.68

Al-Faruqi was somewhat less sanguine about the future of American Muslims. While he had elsewhere advocated capitalism over socialism, promoted the legitimacy of wealth and private property in Islam, and even credited the Puritans with sparking an economic revival in America,69 al-Faruqi did not on this occasion praise America’s ostensible meritocracy. Having long worked with black populations in Philadelphia prisons and in Chicago schools, he overtly addressed some Americans’ continued experiences of repression. Black Americans had been the “untermensch” in America, al-Faruqi argued, and “the evil of social injustice in North America is sufficient to pull its victim away from the status quo and urge him to seek a change.”70 It was only after leaving the United States, during a symposium with al-Faruqi in Pakistan in 1984, that Abdul-Rauf would echo such sharp criticism and, in contrast to his earlier sentiments, rail against global economic titans—both nation states and the ­US-led international bodies he had formerly praised, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—for exploiting the “so-called Third World” nations under the guise of financial aid and benevolence.71



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Between the late 1970s, when Abdul-Rauf wrote for AEI, and 1984, when he penned his critique, the United States abandoned Keynesian policies in favor of deregulation, tax cuts, and budget cuts. The subsequent US recession was painful but—coinciding with the International Monetary Fund’s adoption of structural adjustment programs to change the economic and political systems in nations that borrowed from it—was even more brutal in parts of the “developing” world.72 This global financial crisis chastened Abdul-Rauf. It did not, however, seem to change the perspective of W. D. Mohammed, who spent the 1980s reemphasizing the anti-socialist themes he had stressed during the hostage crises of the 1970s: that Islam is compatible with American democracy and that it is the responsibility of the individual, not the state, to improve economic and social conditions and care for local communities. Individual piety would yield social progress, he maintained, refusing to give credence publically to the idea that black Americans still faced systemic social injustice.73 Feisal Abdul Rauf did not immediately follow in his father’s 1970s footsteps. After graduating from Columbia, Rauf stayed in the New York area, obtained a graduate degree in physics, worked as a schoolteacher, and eventually drew income from real estate. Then, after joining a Sufi order in the 1980s and spending several years as the imam of an affluent Manhattan congregation, he began to promote Sufism—mainly among prosperous second-generation immigrants and proponents of interfaith collaboration. It was only after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that Rauf, seeking to foster greater acceptance of Muslims, began to publish for general audiences and turned to his father’s earlier works—including his father’s dated economic writings—for guidance and inspiration. Two decades after Abdul-Rauf and al-Faruqi conjectured about the future of Muslims in the United States, Rauf echoed many of their arguments about “Abrahamic” Americanness in What’s Right with Islam, as well as some of the critiques of imperialism and nationalism his father and al-Faruqi offered. Crucially, though, his departures from their works are as notable as his agreements with them. As discussed in Chapter 1, the younger Rauf did not include as many cautions about capitalist excess in his 2004 work. Instead—despite the fact that his father and Novak grew increasingly opposed in their economic pronouncements after the rise of neoliberalism under Reagan (Novak eventually came to blame the New Deal, which he had formerly credited with d ­ emocratizing capitalism, for creating a kind of “socialism by regulation”74)—Rauf relied on Novak’s economic assessments and social prescriptions more than his father did and argued for exporting democratic capitalism around the globe. Further,

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while Rauf reiterated some of al-Faruqi’s praise for the Puritans in his promotion of democratic capitalism and Abrahamic commonality, he had very different views about the situation of black Americans and the challenges they face than al-Faruqi did. As I discuss further in Chapter 4, Rauf argued that black Americans are generally as integrated and as accepted as any other population because civil rights legislation removed legal obstacles to equality and Johnson’s affirmative action programs removed economic ones. Rauf ’s perception of American racial equality was likely due, in part, to his limited experience with black American communities and to the prevalence of multicultural rhetoric in the United States during the 1990s—especially during the First Gulf War, when political conservatives pointed to the multiethnic makeup of the American military as proof that black Americans could achieve as much as white Americans, even without affirmative action.75 It also likely due to the ways in which the political favor that some black American Muslims enjoyed in the early 1990s, in part because of their responses to that war, colored ongoing struggles among Muslim American groups to have their various traditions and perspectives regarded as the most authentically Islamic and American. Themes of service and anti-socialism continued to be important as various Muslim Americans tried to have their traditions accepted in the 1990s. Increasingly, though, as evening newscasts focused on domestic and international crises involving conflicts with Muslim-majority states or with terrorists acting in the name of Islam, Muslim Americans’ demonstrations of commitment to their local and national communities were overshadowed. By the end of the 1990s, pundits and politicians were seeking other indicators of Muslim moderation.

Conclusion: Sufism and Service as the Moderate Islam of the New Millennium In 1990, a broad spectrum of political and religious leaders, domestic and foreign, denounced Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for annexing the neighboring oil-producing nation of Kuwait. The United Nations approved sanctions against Iraq, as well as military action by a coalition of countries including other Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia. In September of that year, W. D. Mohammed traveled to Saudi Arabia and delivered an address on the kingdom’s national radio assuring residents of the United States’s benign intentions in moving forces to the region. The US military had not and would not occupy holy cities in Saudi



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Arabia, he promised, and Muslims must recognize that Islamic and American interests converged in the fight against secular Ba’ath Party leader Saddam Hussein’s imperial ambitions.76 Mohammed was somewhat unusual among American Muslim leaders in expressing such sentiments. His organization, like many others, received generous funding from Saudi Arabia and from other coalition partners involved in the 1991 effort to repel Iraq from Kuwait. But even though immigrant-led Muslim organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, the nation’s largest Sunni Muslim organization) similarly rejected Saddam Hussein’s claim of acting, in part, to defend Islam, many were also suspicious of American claims to be acting as liberators when the United States supported I­ srael despite its occupation of Palestine. Rejecting pressure from funders in the Gulf to express their approval, many immigrant-led organizations remained silent. Subsequently, several organizations—those run by black Americans and those run by more recent immigrants and their descendants—severed financial ties with Gulf monarchies and established their financial and political independence. W. D. Mohammed, in contrast, not only justified American actions but contracted one of his businesses with the US military to provide troop rations, advised the US military on Islamic faith and practice, and convinced the Department of Defense to include Muslim chaplains—the first of which was also a black American Muslim—in the military’s ranks.77 In 1992, Mohammed became the first Muslim ever invited to deliver the opening prayer before a session of the US Senate. (Another black American imam, Siraj Wahhaj of Masjid al-Taqwa in Brooklyn, was the first invited to deliver prayers in the US House of Representatives, just after active conflict in the First Gulf War ended in 1991.) Following the 1992 election of Bill Clinton as President, overtures toward black American Muslims increased. Clinton’s administration invited them to the first White House celebration of ‘Id al-Fitr marking the end of Ramadan in 1996 and the first commemoration of Ramadan at the State Department in 1998.78 These gestures contributed to the impression that black American Muslims, somewhat like Jews and Catholics in an earlier era of American history, enjoyed a more equitable status in the United States than actual social conditions indicated. Meanwhile, American Muslims of immigrant descent faced increased public pressure as some neoconservative pundits, lacking a clear enemy after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and disconcerted by US attempts to publically ally with Muslim-majority states, began to popularize fear of Muslim extremism and immigration.79

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As Jewish and Catholic Americans had discovered earlier in the twentieth century, Muslim Americans in the 1990s found that approbation from (and even co-optation by) the federal government failed to translate immediately into broad social acceptance. This was especially clear after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City by extremists. The attack seemed to legitimate fears of a broader threat of so-called Islamic terrorism in the United States and drew attention away from white militants such as Timothy McVeigh, who would bomb the Oklahoma federal building two years later. Responding to a significant increase in anti-Muslim invective, Muslim Americans engaged in a tremendous period of institution building, establishing organizations to fight discrimination, defend Muslim American civil liberties, educate the public about the values Muslims share with other Americans, and encourage interfaith collaboration. Moreover, US Muslims redoubled their efforts to demonstrate their Americanness through community and social service endeavors and disaster relief. Among the institutions established at this time were Islamic Relief, U.S.A. (an American branch of the UK-based global humanitarian and development organization), which opened in California in 1993 and began its first domestic community service work in 1994; ICNA Relief (a domestic service organization affiliated with the primarily immigrantled Islamic Circle of North America, or ICNA), organized in 1994 to provide “­social services” to “underserved” local communities; the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), a multiethnic community service organization formed in Chicago in 1995; and the University Muslim Medical Association (UMMA) Community Clinic, created in 1996 to provide health care to needy populations in Los Angeles.80 This rapid pace of institution building during the 1990s, coupled with the increased pressure to defend Islam and Muslims’ practices, again heightened intra-Muslim contests for authority and representation, as greater numbers of spokespersons—immigrants of various ethnicities, as well as black, L ­ atino, and white Americans—sought to gain positive recognition and to have the needs of their specific communities addressed. Tensions between Muslim groups only worsened in 2000 when immigrant-led Muslim coalitions voted en masse for the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, who had promised to stop racially profiling them, even though most black American Muslims voted for Democratic candidates who supported social programs. Additional pressure on and scrutiny of Muslim Americans after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 once again exacerbated these tensions and, for a



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time, contributed to black Americans’ tendencies to distance themselves from immigrant Muslims. As the US military began a new decade of incursions into Muslim-majority countries in 2001, US officials again looked to Muslim Americans to serve as spokespeople promoting American interests. In contrast to the First Gulf War of 1990–1991, however, they tended to look for Arab and South Asian American Muslim leaders, not to black Americans. Because of the organizing Muslim Americans had done after the First Gulf War and the first World Trade Center bombing, and because of their increased willingness to work with the government, officials at agencies ranging from the State Department to local municipal police stations had plenty of immigrant Muslim Americans to chose from in creating partnerships. While the work of these organizations could have helped to improve public opinion about Muslims in the United States had it received sufficient attention, the Muslim-led charities that most frequently made headlines were not ones engaged in local community service but ones suspected of undermining US interests abroad—specifically, ones organized to provide humanitarian relief to civilians in Iraq, where economic sanctions since 1991 devastated local economies and plunged thousands of people into poverty, and in the Palestinian territories.81 When positive attention was given to Muslims in the news media in the decade before—and, especially, after—9/11, it was less often devoted to Muslim Americans’ professions of service and anti-socialism than it was to ­Sufism. Long depicted as the mystical, apolitical tradition of Islamic practice, Sufism was newly attractive to American policymakers and intelligence officials in the 1990s, as I discuss in the following chapter. Rauf was generally not engaged in public efforts to improve the image of American Muslims in the 1990s, and he remained largely distanced from the contests over authority and representation in which other Muslim leaders were immersed. Rather, he spent the decade writing books for second-generation Muslim Americans, whom he hoped to help adjust to American cultural norms while retaining the core of their religious tradition. For Rauf, Sufi practice is the best expression of what is most essential in Islam. Not surprisingly, he described authentic Islam, on the one hand, and spiritual and social malaise, on the other, in terms of Sufi psychology and art in these books, often to the exclusion of al-Faruqi’s critique of domestic inequalities or his father’s mandates for market restraint. As late as the year 2000, Rauf had planned to devote his third book for Muslim Americans exclusively to the topic of Sufism. Because

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US p ­ olicymakers had identified Sufis as possible allies in the late 1990s, however, Rauf found himself well positioned to become a spokesperson for Muslims more generally. He soon changed the direction of his work and his writing, and—with his narrative of Abrahamic commonality—not only joined the public conversation about authentic Islamic practice in the United States, but also entered the contests over representation he had previously avoided.

3 S U F IS M AND THE MO DER ATE IS L AM OF THE NEW MI L L E NNIU M

of Ramadan began in November 2001, ­Feisal Abdul Rauf commented on its significance for the San Francisco Chronicle. Ramadan is a time of singular importance, he explained, as it is the period for rededicating oneself to the revelation that affords humanity guidance for “differentiating good from evil.” But this Ramadan was painfully poignant for him as an American Muslim, as “this year I am faced with the probability that America, my country, will be at war.”1 As a Muslim leader who spent his entire adulthood in the United States and who experienced Islam as promoting reconciliation and even unification, war during Ramadan was a harsh prospect for Rauf. He was especially disheartened that America, a country he saw as devoted to peace and freedom, would wage war in Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, one of his greatest literary influences. In his response to this disconcerting prospect, Rauf cited verses from Rumi’s six-volume Masnavi on transcending differences of geography and tradition. He then tied this vision of unity to the ethics that, in his view, Muslims, Jews, and Christians share and elaborated on what they meant for interreligious and international relations in the face of a violent and uncertain future. “Our human destiny is to evolve our consciousness,” Rauf argued. Thus, “the war against terrorism means to wage a war against that quality of consciousness that resorts to violence and terror. The solution? Raising our individual and collective consciousness. Love your enemy, Jesus taught.” As “leaders of the free A S T H E M U S L I M H O LY M O N T H

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world,” he continued, Americans have a crucial function in this global ethical and psychological endeavor. In order to guide other nations, Americans must “become whole again, reintegrating ourselves with the aspects of ourselves that have become fragmented, separated, lost from our proper trajectory.” This message of consciousness raising was one Rauf had already spent several years making. Nevertheless, his 2001 version of it differed from past pronouncements. In 1997, when Rauf cofounded the American Sufi Muslim Association (ASMA) with Daisy Khan and Faiz Khan (no relation), he had just published his first book, Islam: A Search for Meaning, which was devoted to showing how Sufism constitutes both the heart of Islamic faith and practice and a kind of consciousness raising that could help individuals recapture the spiritual parts of existence lost in the trials of modern life. Rauf initially wrote that book for the Masjid al-Farah congregation in downtown Manhattan where he had served as imam since the mid-1980s and where most of the congregants “are strongly attracted to Sufism (tasawwuf )” within the context of “orthodox” Islam.2 Unlike his 2001 San Francisco Chronicle piece, Rauf did not connect Sufism to social action or social issues in that book, nor did he link it or the larger practice of Islam to any particular national purpose or agenda. Instead, his writing and his activities with ASMA at that time were largely devoted to explicating the psychology of Sufism and encouraging “spiritual and personal development.”3 The challenges and opportunities brought by the 9/11 attacks caused Rauf to shift course and alter his descriptions of his work and of ASMA’s programs—in 2001 and again several times after that. As he described a few years later, his new goals (and new book) were to demonstrate that [w]hat’s right with Islam is what’s right with America, in the sense that the fundamental ideals of Islam, the idea of what the right society should be, are very similar to what the American idea of what the ideal society should be, as expressed in our founding documents. When Jesus was asked what are the greatest commandments, he said “love God with all your heart” and, coequal to that, “love thy neighbor.” Islamic jurors basically expanded it. They said all the law— how God wants us to live—is to protect and further five fundamental human rights: the right to life, freedom of religion, family, property, and mental wellbeing. What I do in [my 2004] book is map that to the American Declaration of Independence.4

While Rauf ’s dedication to Sufism did not change between 2001 and 2004, that aspect of his work was quickly subsumed into his larger activities—so



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much so that ASMA, which he and Khan began to rebrand as a “cultural” organization dedicated to appreciating Islamic arts and creating an authentically Islamic Muslim American culture, could no longer encompass all of his projects. This led Rauf to cofound another organization in 2004—the specifically interreligious Cordoba Initiative. As we shall see, however, despite minimizing the Sufi aspects of his work after 2004 (even as his activities and objectives expanded beyond promoting Sufi practice), Rauf ’s Sufi identity and title as the founder of the American Sufi Muslim Association were crucial for gaining him audiences among American religious and political elites. I examine the organizations Rauf and Khan led and Rauf ’s rapid change from a part-time imam and Sufi shaykh into an internationally recognized American Muslim spokesperson in Chapter 4. First, I provide here a brief history of Sufi traditions in the United States—particularly those in which Rauf is rooted—and discuss how US policymakers began to regard Sufism as the moderate Islam they sought. Sufi traditions have for centuries been central to cosmopolitan imaginations in the United States, and selectively appropriating them has provided Americans of all racial backgrounds with ways to demonstrate their worldliness. This was not the case with other aspects of Islam. Indeed, the ostensible difference between Sufis and ordinary Muslims, who are supposedly more rigid in their practices and interpretations, has long been part of Sufism’s appeal. During the Cold War—particularly those decades that coincided with popular religious revivals in newly independent countries where both the United States and USSR sought client states—the orientalist idea that Sufis are particularly pliable and opposed to “fundamentalists” took on greater weight in US foreign policy.5 Still, although Sufis occasionally advised US officials during the second half of the twentieth century, the State Department did not consistently attempt to cultivate Sufi allies until the late 1990s. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, American politicians also increased their efforts to recruit Arab American and South Asian American Muslims as defenders of US interests. As I discuss below, all of these efforts sidelined black American Muslims who had spent the 1990s building inroads into institutions of political power. Although black Americans are as likely as any others to practice Sufism, they do not always acknowledge Sufi affiliations. Already marginalized by many Arabs and South Asians who see black American Muslim traditions as less authentic than their own, some black American Sufis hesitate to associate themselves with a practice that can be regarded as unorthodox or as the province of white converts

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and dilettantes.6 Seeking a national political audience after 9/11, when Rauf waded into the ongoing contests between black American Muslims and those of immigrant descent, his Sufi credentials constituted a measurable advantage.

The Ebb and Flow of Sufism in America, from the New World to the New Age Sufi practices in North America are older than the United States itself, as Muslims were among the first immigrants to the Americas, making up an estimated fifteen percent of those imported during the Atlantic slave trade.7 Archaeologists have unearthed strings of blue beads—possibly ones used in Sufi dhikr— from slave burial grounds that lie just blocks from the Wall Street location that was once one of North America’s largest slave markets.8 White colonists and Americans of the early Republican era generally understood little about Muslims’ practices. Even if they had, they were hardly likely to appropriate the traditions of West African slaves. By the nineteenth century, however, some Americans had become enthusiastic about traditions from the “Mystic East.” Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Alger are particularly known for celebrating the Sufi poetry of Hafiz and Rumi, with Emerson arguing that appropriating such Eastern traditions (though not Islam, specifically) was necessary for modern progress.9 Sufi orders also influenced fraternal organizations like the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (or Shriners, a variety of Freemasonry established in 1870 that incorporated the red fez of Ottoman Muslims into its ceremonies). During the same period, other Boston Brahmins began to compare Persian and Indian Sufis favorably to the “hot and rigid Arabs”—as Harvard philosopher William James, Emerson’s godson, called them—whom they saw as overly legalistic.10 As Gilded Age Victorianism gave way to the Progressive Era and the popularity of all things “Eastern,” interest in Sufism grew. Increasing numbers of New Englanders attempted to foster a cosmopolitan “sympathy of religions” in order to facilitate civic cohesion and economic expansion as the United States became a world power. Simultaneously, business leaders stoked interest in “oriental” fashions—in clothing, architecture, and entertainment—while attempting to inculcate consumer habits in the domestic population.11 Drawn by the allure of “oriental” art, enthusiastic audiences greeted Inayat Khan, an Indian Sufi musician, during his 1910 performances at Columbia University and else-



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where. Khan initiated several Americans into his Sufi order. After his death in 1927, some of his followers created their own movements, most of which, like Khan’s Sufi Order of the West, did not identify Sufism strictly with Islam.12 Years later, Khan’s son, Vilayat Inayat Khan, transformed the Sufi Order of the West into the Sufi Order International and contributed to another surge of interest in Sufism among white Americans—one connected to the countercultural currents of the 1960s that, like the first wave, often deemphasized the Islamic aspects of Sufism.13 White Americans were not alone in appropriating Sufi traditions. The ­nineteenth-century Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine—a group organized by and for black Americans who were excluded from white fraternal assemblies like the Shriners—also borrowed significantly from them and, in turn, influenced more widely recognized black American religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple (established in the 1920s) and, later, the Nation of Islam (established in 1930).14 Members of these groups frequently emphasized that—in part because of the esoteric knowledge they ostensibly imparted—such traditions provided ways to transcend dominant Americans’ religious and racial biases.15 Somewhat ironically, Americans’ attempts to demonstrate their cosmopolitanism by appropriating “oriental” traditions coincided with the repression of many such traditions in their countries of origin. In lands occupied by the British, for example, missionaries, academics, and colonial administrators pointed to popular Sufi practices, particularly the veneration of deceased Sufi shaykhs, as proof that local populations lacked the enlightened rationality necessary for self-rule. Importantly, even while emphasizing Muslims’ ostensibly weak administrative capacities and citing “otherworldly” mysticism as the reason for Islamic civilization’s alleged decline, British officials in South Asia attempted to assimilate the economic and political power of Sufi networks.16 These officials and orientalists, who considered “Soofis” to be less focused on Islamic law than were ordinary Muslims, often also viewed “mystics” as potential sympathizers with projects for displacing other Muslim authorities.17 Eventually, some Muslim elites adopted orientalist arguments about irrational Sufis and likewise pointed to their ostensibly superstitious compatriots as evidence of the need for modernization, education, and—sometimes—secularization.18 Areas under imperial control were not the only ones marked by such dynamics. In 1925, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who imposed an aggressive form of secularism on the new Turkish republic and regarded Sufis as both morally dec-

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adent and “politically reactionary and dangerous,” banned Sufi orders outright.19 The government also closed religious schools and assumed the role of training and credentialing imams, thus transforming the remaining public religious leaders into state functionaries. Additionally, it shuttered the Sufi tekkes. (Also known as dargahs, such meeting houses once served as lodges for travelers and had since become centers of intellectual and cultural exchange.) Just as some Americans donned the fez to demonstrate their cosmopolitanism, Atatürk justified prohibiting its use in the same terms, arguing that “primitive” Sufis would corrupt the enlightened Turkish civilization.20 In the following years, some Sufis left Turkey. Others resorted to meeting secretly, gaining more visibility only in the 1950s, when Turkey became a multiparty democracy and ardent Kemalists lost support. In the meantime, a few groups reconstituted themselves as educational and cultural foundations (meeting secretly for devotional purposes) in order to keep their traditions alive and avoid government censure.21 Similar secularization measures were undertaken in Iran, though without the explicit prohibition on Sufism. Like Atatürk, Reza Shah Pahlavi (who in 1925 overthrew the last of the Qajar shahs) secularized education, assumed the power to credential religious leaders (the ulema), and insisted on sartorial changes among his population—most notably, that women cease wearing the head covering they donned as a sign of modesty and status. Muhammad Reza Shah pushed some of these reforms further upon taking power after his father’s death in 1941. The measures alienated not just the ulema, whose power they were designed to curtail, but also Iranian business owners affected by the Shah’s open market reforms and courting of US corporations. Like Kemalists in the Turkish republic, the autocratic Iranian regime sought to mollify some religious leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. To do so, it relied in part on the work of a young scholar who came to be one of the greatest popularizers of Sufism in the United States, as well as a formative influence on Rauf. Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born into a prestigious family in 1933 but left Iran for the United States at the age of twelve, just a few years before US and British intelligence helped to overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran’s oil industry. Nasr spent his adolescence in McCarthy’s America, first at a prep school in New Jersey and then as an undergraduate at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. At MIT he pursued a degree in physics but soon decided that positivist sciences could not alone hold the key to ultimate truth. With the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II, the 1951 executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,



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and the 1953 coup in Iran, the world seemed deep in crisis. Seeking metaphysical answers to the questions his studies of physics failed to solve, Nasr began to read works on Perennialism, a neo-Platonic philosophy that regards all religions as variants of one primordial truth—one “sophia [wisdom] perennis,” and Traditionalism, which rejects secular modern life and advocates a return to “traditional” doctrines and practices.22 Aldous Huxley’s 1945 The Perennial Philosophy introduced many Americans to Perennialism. Parisian Traditionalist-Perennialist René Guénon’s 1927 treatise, The Crisis of the Modern World (translated into English in 1942), also became quite influential in the United States—particularly for Nasr, who read the work on the advice of one of his MIT mentors. Directed to the private Boston library of a founding Perennialist scholar, Nasr discovered early twentiethcentury European Perennialists’ writings on Indo-Persian philosophies and Sufism—ones that he would later expand on and popularize.23 These included works by Martin Lings, who served as “Keeper of the Arabic Library” at the British Library from 1955 to 1973, and the German-speaking Swiss author Titus Burckhardt. Lings and Burckhardt, like Nasr, drew inspiration from yet another Traditionalist-Perennialist luminary: Guénon’s Swiss-born successor, Frithjof Schuon, who emphasized the unity of all religious traditions. Nasr delved deeply into the work of Traditionalist-Perennialists—a pursuit that only increased his dissatisfaction with the physical sciences and intensified his desire for metaphysical truths. After earning a master’s degree in geology and geophysics from Harvard in 1956, Nasr turned his attention to classical Muslim philosophers. While in pursuit of a doctorate, he traveled widely in E ­ urope, North Africa, and the Middle East. Nasr’s later writings bear the imprint of his experiences during these travels, which included establishing personal relationships with Schuon and Burckhardt and joining the ‘Alawiyya-­ Shadhiliyya Sufi order into which Schuon had been initiated in Algeria in 1932.24 After receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1958, Nasr returned to Iran to take a position at Tehran University and there continued his personal and academic inquiries into Persian-language philosophies of time, nature, and existence.25 Afterward, he frequently traveled to North America and Europe to lecture and network, and his academic writing about Islam influenced the way many American professors and policy makers understood it.26 But he also wrote more popularly about Sufism, Perennialism, and (following G ­ uénon) the crises of the modern world, and these works enjoyed broad influence in the United States. Books such as his 1968 quasi-environmentalist salvo The

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­ ncounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man were emE braced not only by white, middle-class college students and “spiritual seekers” fascinated by non-Western traditions, but also by young first- and secondgeneration Muslim Americans—including Rauf—who sough to reconcile their traditions with the historically Protestant but increasingly secular and libertarian culture of the United States.27 Nasr’s Traditionalist-Perennialist Sufism was not the only Sufi tradition to gain popularity in America, of course. Scholars have documented the existence of numerous Sufi orders in the United States—some of which were and are much more explicit about their Islamic roots and observances than Khan’s Sufi Order of the West and much less universalist or traditionalist than Nasr’s order.28 Nevertheless, Nasr’s accessible writings on Sufi psychology, on the beauty of Sufi traditions, and on the centrality of art and Sufism to Islamic practice were tremendously important for disseminating awareness of Sufism at a time when few non-academic works were available on the subject.29 These works, his more philosophical writings, and his deep connections to scholars and academic institutions in the United States and Canada proved invaluable when, after several years of affiliating with the Shah’s regime, he left Iran.30 Nasr was in London when the Iranian Revolution began and did not return home. He has since lived in America, occupying academic positions at Temple University and George Washington University and serving as the head of the Maryamiyya Sufi order, the tariqa Schuon created.31 Nasr’s prestige and influence as a scholar of Islam are such that he was invited in 2000 to deliver the esteemed Gifford Lectures on religion—the first Muslim scholar ever to do so. His reputation was established long before that, however. Just a few years after Nasr returned to the United States, for example, William Baroody of the American Enterprise Institute asked him to write the foreword to a book about Islam’s support for capitalism.32 That book, written by Rauf ’s father, is but one of many connections between Nasr and Rauf. Rauf first read Nasr in college and was influenced by him in ways that go beyond their similar affinity for democratic capitalism. Most notably, Rauf followed Nasr in embracing Schuon’s belief in the “transcendent unity of religions” and in the existence of one sophia perennis continually expressed in the great scriptures, philosophies, and artworks produced by followers of the world’s various religious traditions.33 Further, Rauf ’s early personal history mirrored Nasr’s to some extent: after immigrating to the United States as a teenager and obtaining degrees in the physical sciences, Rauf also found physical explana-



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tions for natural phenomena unsatisfying, and—like Nasr—discovered kinship and purpose in a Sufi community full of Euro-American converts. These converts, like those in Nasr’s order, employed Sufi psychology as a means of fostering personal development and insisted on the centrality of art and aesthetics to Islam, as well as on the unity of all of the world’s religious traditions.

The New Age and A New Era for Sufism in America The artistic and religiously eclectic Sufi community Rauf joined first took shape around a charismatic leader in an era that witnessed the mass commercialization of Sufism. Not only did publication and distribution of Rumi’s M ­ asnavi—what would become the best-selling anthology of poetry in the United States—­ increase in the 1970s, but audiences flocked to sold-out performances of Sufi dances at locations such as Carnegie Hall. These ostensibly apolitical cultural traditions—including those popularized by the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufis who opened Masjid al-Farah—often served as the first introduction to Islam for many Americans and as an alternative to the images of so-called militant Muslims (black American, Iranian, Arab, and otherwise) then common in the press. Shaykh Muzaffer Özak al-Jerrahi, the Turkish leader of the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi order, attracted several American followers with celebrations of Sufi dhikr at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, a prestigious Episcopal church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A former imam turned book dealer, “Shaykh Muzaffer” had been affiliated with one Sufi order or another since his youth— despite the fact that visiting a Sufi dargah or practicing as part of a tariqa had been illegal in Turkey. The Halveti-Jerrahi tariqa with which Muzaffer affiliated survived Atatürk’s ban on Sufi orders, though the entrance to the tomb of the tariqa’s founding shaykh was padlocked by the government at one point. When restrictions on religious expression were somewhat relaxed in the 1950s, the Halveti-Jerrahis organized a foundation to promote what they described as the “traditional” Turkish music and dance involved in their ceremonies. This allowed them to continue their practices and even expand while other tariqas remained underground entirely.34 In 1966, not long after assuming leadership of the Jerrahi branch of the order, Shaykh Muzaffer took the risky and unprecedented step of opening up one of the Istanbul dargahs, allowing the general public to enter and observe Sufi ceremonies in person. He also began publishing treatises on Sufism for general audiences, focusing—among other things—on the refined cultural ­aspects

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of the tradition, a simultaneously savvy and sincere strategy that Muzaffer was equipped to defend, given his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Muzaffer’s emphasis on the aesthetic attributes of Sufism in the 1960s and 1970s, in addition to his insistence on remaining apolitical while others actively resisted secular nationalist reforms, protected members of the order from prosecution, despite their open practices.35 In the late 1970s, Muzaffer began to travel with his dervishes, taking their ceremonies to international venues such as the Traditional Art Festival in Berlin. Their performances there, in Paris, and at another festival in Rennes involved singing and chanting the names of God and verses from the Qur’an— the dhikr practice that is common across Sufi orders, although the wird, the litany of names and verses recited, differs according to each order’s tradition. It also involved “turning,” a slow spinning also practiced by the most famous order of “whirling dervishes,” the Mevlevis, who lay claim to the lineage of Rumi.36 Turning occurs during a part of the ceremony known among the Jerrahis and Mevlevis as sema’ (or, in Arabic, sama’—a sort of intent listening), and is a kind of “physically active meditation” through which dervishes seek to overcome the nafs (or self) and its “egos or personal desires by listening to the music, focusing on God, and spinning one’s body in repetitive circles.” 37 After establishing its cultural foundation, the order presented these practices as “customary dance” and as part of Turkish heritage.38 While this strategy satisfied Turkish officials, it did not improve the reputation of Sufis among Muslim authorities who regarded such practices as heretical innovations attached to Islam after the Prophet’s death. Among the dervishes in Rennes in 1978 was Tosun Bayrak, a Turkish expatriate, artist, and professor of art and art history who was instrumental in the order’s later visits to America. Bayrak moved to the United States in the 1940s to attend the University of California at Berkeley and returned in the 1960s, after which he taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and The Cooper Union.39 Before meeting Muzaffer, Bayrak was not a particularly pious Muslim. But he experienced a religious crisis after the death of his mother in 1974 and began to seek out Sufis. This search led him to the Jerrahis and to Muzaffer.40 Three years after joining the Halveti-Jerrahis, and at Muzaffer’s urging, Bayrak turned half of his house in Spring Valley, New York (less than an hour’s drive from the city), into a dargah and established the Jerrahi Order of America.41 It was not the Jerrahis’ only US outpost. Robert Frager, a Harvard-trained



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psychologist, also joined the order in the 1970s and integrated Sufi traditions into the program at his California Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.42 Nevertheless, Bayrak did not expect in the late 1970s that an American convert would one day rival his position as head of the US order, much less that he would compete for his shaykh’s legacy with a woman. As I discuss below, however, the Halveti-Jerrahi—a tariqa that already had a reputation for internal dissension and splitting43—would soon be reinvented for a religiously eclectic American audience. Bayrak was not the only person responsible for Muzaffer’s first visit to the United States in 1978. While Bayrak used personal connections to secure visas for the group,44 funding for that excursion came from a source he does not mention in his memoirs: billionaire philanthropist Dominique de Menil, a deeply religious heiress whose family fortune derived from the sale of her father’s oil-retrieval technology.45 Passionately devoted to art as well as to Catholicism, Menil (she dropped the “de” to avoid appearing pretentious) and her husband, John, commissioned Mark Rothko to paint more than a dozen monochromatic canvases for a modernist chapel they built in Houston, Texas, during the 1960s. The Rothko Chapel has since become their most famous legacy, though it represents only a minute portion of their collection.46 According to one of Menil’s daughters, Philippa, Dominique made a “deathbed promise” to John, who died of cancer in 1973, that she would “bring the whirling dervishes back to this country . . . They had seen [some] together in the sixties and had both fallen passionately in love, especially him.”47 After contacting Turkish orders, Dominique and Philippa met one of Muzaffer’s representatives—likely Bayrak, though neither Bayrak nor Philippa acknowledges the other in their retellings of these events—and were so impressed they bought tickets for Muzaffer and ten of his followers to travel from Rennes to the United States. While in New York for their first visit, Muzaffer and his dervishes performed dhikr at Saint John the Divine where, three years earlier, members of Vilayat Inayat Khan’s Sufi order had performed during the U.N.’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations.48 It was the Halveti-Jerrahis’ first experience participating in an American-style “interfaith” gathering (as Cathedral Director Reverend James Park Morton described it), but the group was prepared for the enthusiastic reception they received due to their performances in Germany and France, during which audience members had chanted the beginning of the shahada— the Islamic profession of faith, which begins with la ’ilaha ’illa-llah (“there is no

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God but God”)—along with the performers, and then joined in the resonant breathing of the words Allah and Hu, the latter Arabic for “He,” meaning the divine Creator. Muzaffer later recalled being asked after one performance about his habit of including Christians and members of other religious groups (or those of no religion) in the ceremonies and explaining in response, “‘I accept anyone who utters “Allah” in my ceremony’ . . . [because] the duty of all prophets is to make people affirm LA ILAHA ILLA-LLAH, the profession of Divine Unity, regardless of their nationality, color, or race.”49 Performing such interreligious ceremonies at Saint John the Divine soon became a regular practice, as— thanks to Philippa—Muzaffer and his entourage returned to the United States for twelve weeks each year, spending part of every spring and every autumn in Manhattan from 1979 until Muzaffer’s death in 1985. In 1979, Philippa “took hand” with Muzaffer, effectively joining his order by pledging allegiance, or bay’a, to him as a religious leader and mentor. At the time, she and her husband, Heiner Friedrich, were immersed in the contemporary art scene, having established the Dia Art Foundation in 1974 to support groundbreaking minimalist and conceptual artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Walter de Maria, as well as to amass and showcase the works of others, including Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Joseph Beuys. To facilitate both the scale of the works (de Maria’s Lightning Field stretched across an entire mile of New Mexico desert) and the success of Dia’s extensive patronage commitments (at its height, the foundation sponsored nearly a dozen artists “with stipends, studios, assistants, and archivists for the individual museums it planned to build for each of them”), Philippa poured nearly $35 million of her inheritance into the organization. Then, but not for much longer, Dia occupied the bulk of her energies. In time, “Fariha”—the name, meaning “ease and peace of Paradise,” that Muzaffer gave Philippa during her initiation ceremony—would give up the contemporary art world almost entirely to focus on Sufism.50 Not only did Fariha fund Muzaffer’s semiannual visits to New York with his followers, in 1980 she and Heiner built a dargah—a permanent space for Muzaffer’s group to worship—inside an old firehouse on Mercer Street in what was then the artists’ enclave of SoHo. They designated it Masjid al-Farah (the Mosque of Divine Ease).51 That same year, Fariha and another New Yorker transitioned from being Muzaffer’s dervishes to his official successors—a development rather unconventional in the history of the order and one that did not always sit well with others, such as Bayrak. The other New Yorker, Lex Hixon (“Shaykh Nur”), was a local celebrity who had received a doctorate from



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­ olumbia University in 1976 and since authored multiple works on the essenC tial unity of the world’s religions.52 Hixon hosted the popular radio talk show In the Spirit on New York’s WBAI from 1972 to 1989 and first interviewed Muzaffer for the program, with Bayrak serving as a translator, in the late 1970s.53 He became a dervish shortly thereafter.54 Three years later, during one of Muzaffer’s semiannual visits, Rauf—then in his mid-thirties—first visited Masjid al-Farah. He had learned about the mosque and Sufi community from a friend who was translating one of Muzaffer’s books. On that visit, Rauf was initially unimpressed. Muzaffer was not in attendance and the four thousand-square-foot space was populated with only six worshipers. Nevertheless, at the request of the Turkish man volunteering as imam that day, Rauf delivered the call to prayer for the small group. Urged to return and give the call to prayer regularly, he hesitated. The next morning, however, when opening one of his books, Rauf ’s eyes fell on a section titled “On the Excellence of Calling the Prayer.” Feeling divinely inspired, he took the position.55 During Rauf ’s next visit a week later, Muzaffer was present along with many others. Enchanted, Rauf later described this meeting with Muzaffer as the beginning of what seemed an inevitable spiritual journey. Not only did he join Muzaffer’s order that year, he also accepted Muzaffer’s invitation to deliver khutbahs on the many Fridays that Muzaffer was absent. “I had known for several years that I would one day be giving Friday sermons in New York City,” Rauf later recalled. “It wasn’t clear to me how I knew this . . . Rationally, I could not give credit to this vision I had had; but here I was, witnessing the situation actually unfolding as I had, in some recess of my mind, known it would.”56 When Rauf agreed to serve as imam of the downtown dargah in 1983, he did so on one condition: that he not be drawn into the rivalries between Muzaffer’s followers.57 In contrast to Fariha and Nur, whose New York City group— known as the Nur Ashki (loosely, “Divine Light and Love”) Jerrahis—adheres to Nur’s vision of the mystical reality that, they believe, underlies all religions, Bayrak’s primarily Turkish segment of Muzaffer’s order describe themselves as a more “traditional” and explicitly Islamic group.58 Attempting to avoid the conflict between them, Rauf outlined a middle position that—like Nasr and unlike Nur, who was also an Orthodox priest and had trained to become a Zen master 59—involves emphasizing the ethical and mystical parts of the divine reality that he believes other religions share while maintaining an emphasis on faithfully practicing the tradition into which he was born.

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Just as the Nur Ashki Jerrahis settled into their new SoHo space with their new imam, they were uprooted by a leadership change and relocation. The tumult began with a hostile takeover at Dia in 1985, which involved the ouster of Heiner, installation of a new executive director, and Fariha’s removal as the head of the board. Despite the enormous amount of money Fariha had devoted to it, the foundation was on the verge of insolvency, and sponsored artists had begun to express discontent with the directors. After a drop in oil prices changed the value of its stock holdings, Dia was forced to sell some of its properties. As a result, the dargah left its Mercer Street location. Heiner and Fariha reestablished the mosque and meeting rooms in a three-story storefront building just south of a tiny municipal park on West Broadway in Tribeca. Shaykh Nur affectionately called their new home the “jewel box” after the great spiritual treasures held within even that diminutive space.60 The 1985 Dia board of director’s coup coincided with another loss that caused Fariha to reevaluate her life’s mission. According to one board member, the reorganized foundation’s first board meeting convened on the very “same day that the head of [Fariha’s] Sufi sect had died in Istanbul. She said she thought it was a sign from Heaven that as we took over the board their spiritual leader died.”61 With Muzaffer’s passing, Fariha and Nur assumed leadership of the Manhattan Sufi community while Bayrak continued to direct the Spring Valley branch. The two groups met together occasionally, as they had done in years past, but tensions often surfaced, particularly over the question of whether it is Islamically correct for a woman to lead.62 In the meantime, Rauf continued to deliver Friday khutbahs for the Nur Ashki Jerrahis and eventually collected them in book form as Islam: A Search for Meaning. The goal of his teachings, he explained in the foreword, was to “remind” (a primary Sufi term) “the congregation of its relationship with God and to exhort them towards Him.”63 This was a task Rauf invested with even greater import in 1995 when Nur passed away after fifteen years as the effective leader of the Manhattan Jerrahis and left guidance of the Sufi group and its satellite communities exclusively to Fariha. Female leadership is not uncommon among the satellite groups, some of which are also headed by women. Such leadership is less common in Muslim-majority contexts outside of North America, however, including those from which Bayrak and Rauf immigrated. Nur’s death occurred close to the time when Rauf published his first book and began receiving invitations to speak as an authority on Islamic law, despite his lack of formal training. Shortly thereafter, Rauf developed ties to a



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non-­Jerrahi Sufi community and began considering the possibility of creating his own group. It would not be long before Rauf—who initially focused on the Jerrahi traditions of conquering the ego and fostering personal development—found himself repeating Muzaffer’s strategy of stressing the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Sufism so as to dispel the specter of political Islam. Unlike Muzaffer, however, Rauf did so while working with political leaders. This was not a task he undertook in the 1990s. Only after the terrorist attacks of 2001 leveled the World Trade Center did Rauf feel impelled to defend Islam from its critics. Unbeknownst to him, the timing was fortuitous.

From Personal Piety to Cultural Programs Rauf ’s most well known book, What’s Right with Islam, quickly gained the attention of the State Department and the White House after its 2004 publication. From that year on, Rauf and Daisy Khan continually presented their public work in terms of America’s Abrahamic ethics, culture, history, and future. Those 2004 themes, however—like the organizations Rauf created—took shape only gradually over the preceding decade. One can see their evolution in his earlier writings and witness how Rauf ’s ideas and organizations emerged and changed as personal transformations in his own life, such as his elevation to the status of a Sufi shaykh, intersected with national and international issues and trends. In the 1990s, Rauf did not envision himself as the leader of an organization for engaging policymakers in “healing the divide between Muslims and the West.”64 At that time, his ambitions and activities were more modest, related to encouraging the private personal practice of Sufism. As the son of a highly regarded imam, Rauf knew that Sufi practices were not accepted by all Muslims and that they were banned in some countries. He acknowledged this in the introduction to his first book in 1995 and provided several disclaimers at the outset. “I am not a professional Muslim scholar,” he admitted.65 Yet he insisted that his emphasis on Sufism was not at odds with “orthodox Islam.” The khutbahs he delivered at the Masjid al-Farah, which comprised the bulk of the book, “sought to explain both what is understood to be orthodox Islam and the general thrust of Sufism, not as separate entities, but as part and parcel of a homogenous, self-consistent, greater whole: Religion as an expression of human self-fulfillment at the personal, individual level.”66 Writing and speaking for a diverse audience of converts and young American-born Muslims, Rauf sought not to address the basics of Islam but to help believers with the “difficult

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questions,” such as how to reconcile Sufi practice with the Prophet Muhammad’s example—or sunna, from which the word “Sunni” derives—when the Prophet never spoke of tasawwuf directly, or how to understand the ultimate fate of family members who do not profess Islam.67 More than that, however, Rauf presented the book as a resource for teaching Sufi initiates how to deepen their experiences with the Divine. “To the extent that I have studied Islam, my objective has been to achieve the perfection of faith, and not of scholarship,” Rauf wrote, for “it is the soul, and not the intellect, that must be addressed.”68 In addition to explicating Sufi psychology in Islam: A Search for Meaning, Rauf devoted a great deal of space in that and his second book, Islam, A Sacred Law: What Every Muslim Should Know About the Shariah, to defending the orthodoxy of Sufi practices and to helping practitioners understand how to live in a nation not organized around Islamic norms and institutions. For Rauf, such authentic living requires learning to separate the universal precepts of Islam from the various customs to which, he believes, they are often attached. Sufi practices and traditions are essential to this exercise because they enable devotees to tap into the part of themselves that already understands the spirit of the shari‘ah and can help them avoid confusing universal precepts with local cultural rules. “The Sufi exercises and training are meant to awaken and then exercise the various inner organs of our perception and action,” he explained in his 1995 book. “Our inner being is in fact a repository of wisdom connected to God in an essential and submitted fashion . . . It knows what is right and wrong for us at every given moment.”69 Emphasizing the relationship between what he considers the outward, or “external,” practices of shari‘ah and the Sufi practices that lead to a properly cultivated “inner” personal self (nafs), Rauf argued that Sufism and shari‘ah together provide a universal practice adaptable to any locality.70 Simultaneously, Rauf attempted to separate the proper practice of Sufism from the connotations it had acquired among proponents of New Age spirituality. Stressing the theme of personal spiritual development (rather than social transformation) that is a hallmark of Sufi psychology, he argued that “Sufism, especially in America in the past twenty years, has in some quarters taken on meanings quite contrary to tasawwuf. It has become associated in the minds of many with poetry and dancing, with at most a light veneer of Islam. Tasawwuf is properly the experiential refinement and deepening of the Islamic Shari‘ah within the psyche of the Sufi, and not the abandonment of it.”71For readers who wanted to know more about Islamic law—or, more precisely, about the common teachings of the four



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major Sunni law schools, whose differences Rauf described as “minor”—Rauf recommended his forthcoming book on the shari‘ah.72 Although presented as a natural extension of his first monograph, that second book can, in retrospect, be seen as the beginning of Rauf ’s move away from his role as the imam of a local Sufi community and toward a more public life as an international Muslim leader and self-professed legal authority. In 1995, while Rauf was finishing his first manuscript, Dr. Faroque Khan—an Indian expatriate and one of the esteemed leaders of the affluent Islamic Center of Long Island—invited him to address the annual meeting of the Islamic Medical Association of North America. Khan’s goal was to provide Muslim physicians with guidelines for making shari‘ah-compliant bioethics decisions. He was aware that Rauf ’s training was in physics, not Islamic law, but he also knew that Rauf was the son of an eminent Al-Azhar-trained scholar and viewed him as a suitable authority for his medical colleagues. Rauf decided to address the meeting, which was held in Malaysia, where Rauf was raised and enjoyed close ties to political elites—including to the prime minister, who attended the gathering—and where Rauf would later open an office for the Cordoba Initiative.73 After the conference, he published his lectures for American audiences. In the resulting book, Rauf explained the importance of the science of Islamic law (usul al-fiqh), described how Muslims could learn to separate the ethical “spirit and intent of the Shari‘ah” from cultural practices that were viewed unfavorably in the United States, and briefly discussed the gentle approach to inculcating Islamic law and ethics that he had written about more extensively in his first treatise. That gentle approach involved introducing Muslims to the beauty of Sufism: In the Masjid al-Farah in New York City, the mosque in which I preach, we deal with many converts and young Muslims born into Muslim families. Being new to the practice of Islam, even when born into Muslim families, they may find the sudden imposition of practicing all of the Islamic rituals onerous . . . Being more concerned that the individual acquire and taste the transformative and disciplinary powers of prayer, fasting and the other joys of worship, and anchor it on a very strong foundation of belief and love of God, we encourage our congregation to taste the Divine Presence which urges the human soul to then desire worship and taste its sweetness . . . Our focus is therefore on how to increase our congregation’s love for God, for love feeds the urge towards discipline far more effectively than discipline feeds the urge to love.74

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“Tasting” is a common Sufi metaphor for dhikr and one Rauf often used in his khutbahs. Such tasting, he argued in his second book, is key to understanding the “reasoning behind the Shari‘ah . . . [and] enables you, in new circumstances and when faced with modern dilemmas, to apply your reasoning to arrive at a comfortably correct decision.”75 The purpose of Islamic law, he further explained, was not to make life more onerous but easier. Importantly, Rauf cautioned, such personal interpretation (known in Arabic as ijtihad) does not qualify just anyone to claim legal authority, and the work of scholars and jurists is still necessary. Nevertheless, even Muslims who do not have regular access to such experts are not without resources, so long as they understand the law’s requirements, its ethical intent, and how to discern interpretations based on customs from those rooted in its essential aspects.76 Reaching for an illuminating historical analogy, Rauf described the role of Sufi practice in helping Muslims to understand and enact Islam properly as akin to the role of Vatican II in helping American Catholics develop a more personal and—­ implicitly—­rational faith.77 Rauf ’s mention of Vatican II was not his first allusion to the commonalities between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In 1995, Rauf had noted—briefly—that Islam is “part of the Judeo-Christian ethic, not in the usually defined sense, but certainly from the Qur’anic point of view.”78 This subject occupied more space in Rauf ’s second book, however, and was presented there with fewer caveats about religious differences. For example, in a chapter of his second book titled “Can the Shari‘ah Evolve,” Rauf—giving evidence of Nasr’s Perennialist ­influence—elaborated on how engaging in Sufism and apprehending the universal aspects of Islam allowed Muslims to see their commonalities with Jews and Christians. While the ritual forms, or “outer manifestations,” of various traditions differed, he contended, the “inner content” was identical. With regards to prayer, “‘differentiation’ [w]as an ‘evolution’ of a kind. What evolved was not the eternally mandated practice of ritual prayer in its inner sense and dimension, but the outer manifestation (language, movements, etc.) to suit the language and the reality of the time . . .”79 Also in his first book, Rauf had asserted that there “are fundamental philosophical differences between Islamic law and United States law.”80 He did not include such distinctions in his second treatise. Yet, although Rauf devoted slightly more attention in his second book to interreligious commonalities and to Muslims’ abilities to live authentically while observing United States laws—themes that would consume the bulk of his 2004 work—he still had



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not articulated the thesis of American Abrahamic commonality for which he would become known after 9/11. His primary focus was not yet on establishing inter­religious harmony, serving as an international authority on Islamic law, or acting as a mediator between Muslim-majority countries and Christian ones— what he would later describe as his goals with Cordoba. Rather, in the 1990s, even while presenting himself as something of an authority on Islamic law, Rauf was becoming more committed to promoting Sufism than ever before. This was especially the case after 1996, when Rauf developed ties to a shaykh who saw in him the qualities not just of an imam but of an anointed international leader. Eleven years after Muzaffer’s death and one year after Nur’s, Rauf attended a sacred musical festival in Morocco. Before he left New York, Fariha’s husband, Heiner, whom Rauf describes as “very perceptive” and who perhaps imagined that Rauf would not be comfortable with a religiously eclectic female shaykh, cautioned him: “now don’t go and take hand with another sheikh there.”81 While Rauf did not take hand with another leader on that particular trip, it was not long before he did. During the spring of the following year, Rauf returned to Morocco, where he met Shaykh Hamazah ibn ‘Abbas al-Qadiri, the leader of the Qadiri Sufi order whose lineage he would later assume.82 That year—1997— was an eventful one for Rauf. Not only did his travels to Morocco constitute physical separation from his Jerrahi community, Rauf created additional distance from them when, just a few months after first meeting Shaykh Hamazah, he cofounded the ASMA Society for “enhancing the general public knowledge of Islam and Sufism in particular and promoting personal and spiritual growth and development through meditation and prayer.”83 Faiz Khan, who grew up attending the Islamic Center of Long Island, and Daisy Khan, Faroque Khan’s niece, served as Rauf ’s cofounders. (Acting on an injunction revealed to her in a dream that Rauf interpreted, Daisy Khan had married Rauf the year before.84) Rauf and Khan would steer the ASMA Society through a multitude of endeavors over the next decade and a half, as unexpected developments continually presented them with opportunities to redefine their objectives and expand their mission—albeit in ways that moved them ever further from their local Sufi practice. ASMA’s 1997 articles of incorporation did not present the organization as particularly ambitious. Its founders—already busy working as a real-estate manager (Rauf), corporate project manager (Daisy), and emergency-room doctor (Faiz)—outlined only two basic strategies for promoting Sufism: hosting “meetings, workshops, lectures, and special events” and conducting

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“­meditation and prayer sessions.”85 During the organization’s first several years, these sessions—generally, dhikr services held on Friday evenings so as not to conflict with the Jerrahi dhikr services at Masjid al-Farah on Thursday nights— occurred at Rauf ’s New Jersey home or in the Manhattan living room of Daisy Khan’s one-bedroom apartment. In 1999, however, two transformative developments brought challenges and opportunities for recognition that prompted Rauf and Khan to reorient ASMA and alter its stated objectives. First, while on another trip to Morocco, Rauf accepted a new mandate for his work in the United States. According to Rauf, Shaykh Hamazah, a former high-ranking official in the Moroccan military, believed himself to be holding his position as leader of their Qadiri tariqa “in trust for its owner, who will come from abroad to assume it.” During the month of Ramadan, Hamazah had a dream that revealed Rauf as that rightful owner. “I am now responsible for introducing the tariqah in the West,” Rauf explained to a journalist the next year, “except that now it is to be presented to the West in ways it can understand.”86 Second, a Washington, DC, State Department forum on Islam gave favorable emphasis to Sufis and provided Rauf with a ready audience for his new mission. At that forum, the leader of another Sufi group—­Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, the US representative of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America in 1998—reinforced the tendency among State Department officials to identify Sufis as peaceful, apolitical, and moderate and to view all other Muslims as possible extremists. Kabbani, who was aware that some Muslims consider Sufism to be suspect and who wanted to make allies for Sufis out of American policy makers, told the audience at that forum that he had visited over one hundred American mosques and found 80 percent of them to be run by “extremists” and “fundamentalists.” Many American Muslim organizations protested this caricature and demanded Kabbani retract his statement. Nevertheless, the Bush administration, following President Clinton’s example, continued to court Kabbani as an ally, to treat him as an authoritative spokesperson for and about American Muslims, and to include him in White House Iftar (Ramadan fast-breaking) events.87 After 9/11, Bush’s State Department would place even greater emphasis on seeking Sufi allies at home and abroad, as both the United States and Britain condemned extremism “by praising Sufism as the tolerant form of Islam.” 88 ASMA and, later, the Cordoba Initiative would ultimately benefit from and



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become important to these Bush-administration endeavors. In 1999, though, Rauf was not aware of the State Department’s developing attitudes toward different Muslim communities. Nor did Rauf share Kabbani’s belief that American Muslims were overwhelmingly extremists, despite the fact that he would later echo his American Muslim spokesperson competitors (black American and immigrant, Sufi and otherwise) by presenting himself as a uniquely “moderate” Muslim voice.89 Over the next several years, Rauf raised money for ASMA by drawing honoraria from talks before Muslims and interreligious audiences; the venerable Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York, for example, has been one of Rauf ’s frequent lecture sites since then. He also benefited from the increasingly positive attention given to Sufis after 9/11, particularly to those who emphasized the aesthetic beauty of Sufi practices and who juxtaposed appreciation of such “cultural” traditions to the rigid dogmatism of ostensible extremists. In so doing, Rauf continued to follow the examples set by ­Muzaffer and Nasr of promoting Sufism, in part, by emphasizing the “inner truths” of Islamic art, including Sufi poetry and the Qur’anic recitations (a central part of Sufi dhikr) that Rauf likens to music.90 This was something he had done even prior to 9/11.91 Shortly after the 2001 attacks, however, as I discuss in Chapter 4, it became a crucial way for ASMA to distance itself from the specter of extremism. In addition to emphasizing the moderating influence of Sufism and (or, as) Islamic culture after 9/11, Rauf began to focus on making Islam more sympathetic to non-Muslim audiences. Incorporating his work on the Sufi practice of dhikr into a larger treatise that combined themes from his previous writings with political and economic policy prescriptions, Rauf fit Sufism and other Islamic traditions into narrative templates that other marginalized religious minorities had previously created—narratives that highlighted commonalities between religions (particularly regarding ethics, civic service, and economic freedom) and, in Rauf ’s version, between American laws and Islamic ones. Relying on his father’s teachings, Michael Novak’s economic writings from the 1970s and 1980s, and Will Herberg’s 1950s narratives of inevitable immigrant upward mobility, however, Rauf portrayed only certain segments of the American Muslim population (e.g., recent Arab and South Asian immigrants) as normative and typically moderate. In so doing, Rauf tapped into the racialized debates over militancy and moderation discussed in the previous chapter and heightened existing contests over representation.

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Conclusion: Sufi Sympathies and the Politics of Representation By the end of the twentieth century, American Sufis represented a wide variety of ethnicities, and both black American Sunni leaders and more recent immigrants had garnered influence with the White House and State Department, offering sometimes-competing perspectives on American Muslims’ traditions, needs, and interests. As discussed in the previous chapter, these diverse figures had struggled to have their own expressions and practices accepted as the most authentically Islamic and most authentically American since the 1970s. In part because of this struggle, black Americans were not as likely as white or even immigrant Muslims to divulge their Sufi sympathies if they had any—­ something that may have cost them opportunities for representation after 9/11. Among the black American Muslims who avoided using the term “Sufism” (with its connotations of whiteness and of unorthodox behavior) to describe their practices was Shaykh-‘Allama Al-Hajj Ahmad Tawfiq, a former member of El-Hajj Malik al-Shabbaz (Malcolm X)’s Muslim Mosque, Inc., a graduate of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, and the founding imam of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem (incorporated in 1967).92 The Sufi practices held at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood took place less than a half mile from the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where affluent white audiences gathered to watch Muzaffer’s dervishes whirl. Although the largely black American Muslim population there lived in a blighted section of the city rather than an affluent one and connected their religious practices to social justice concerns more than to psychological introspection, they were no less open to members of other religions or the general public than the Jerrahis. In fact, Imam Talib Abdur Rashid—a disciple of Shaykh Tawfiq who assumed leadership of the community after the founding shaykh’s death—was well known among New York religious leaders long before Rauf joined the Manhattan Jerrahis. Less sensationalist than Imam Siraj Wahhaj, the nationally recognized leader of Masjid al-Taqwa in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn,93 Abdur Rashid had been involved in interreligious events and social activism in the city for decades by the time Rauf founded ASMA. In 1979, for example, just after Rauf ’s father addressed academics at the American Academy of Religion’s Manhattan meeting, “Imam Talib” (as he is commonly known) and James Park Morton convened a joint discussion at Saint John the Divine to defend Muslims against the specter of terrorism.94 Years later, after



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the first World Trade Center bombing, the New York Times frequently covered Abdur Rashid’s activities, which included serving as a regular prison chaplain, participating in a weekly “trialogue” with a church and a synagogue on the Upper West Side, lobbying the Time Warner Cable company to keep a religiously oriented channel on the air, and holding New Year’s Eve services at his mosque. These latter events, one Times reporter described, included dhikr, a potluck, and the music of Miles Davis.95 Abdur Rashid’s work with Christian and Jewish communities and his openness to the media paved the way for Rauf, who—as he acknowledged to a New York Times reporter in 2004—had little to do with politics, the press, or interreligious dialogue in the 1990s: “The attacks changed me . . . Before September 11, I was an Islamic teacher focusing on the theological, spiritual, and jurisprudential side of my faith. I suddenly had to explain my faith and myself. I started going to television and radio studios, churches and synagogues, talking with other religious leaders about Islam.”96 So successful was he in communicating with non-Muslims that Rauf quickly became a sought-after source for journalists. His appearances in the pages of the Times—where he was identified as a Sufi and as a proponent of a “moderate Islam” that “embraces the values of Western democracy, carries within it a love of America, and calls on Muslims to respect other faiths”—quickly equaled and then surpassed those of Abdur Rashid.97 In the meantime, Rauf developed relationships with anchors at CBS, CNN, and other television networks, as well as with journalists and editors at other publications. Most notable among these was Newsweek, which featured a picture of Rauf ’s Sufi community on its cover in 2007 and made Rauf and Khan regular contributors to the Newsweek-Washington Post blog, On Faith, for several years after that, affording them a national platform for discussing their priorities and disseminating their perspectives. Like Abdur Rashid and other Muslim American leaders before them, Khan and Rauf were concerned about the rights and needs of Muslims after 9/11 and became cautiously more vocal about their politics during the decade that followed. As they did so, however, they also made clear that their priorities increasingly had to do with international issues and not with the domestic communities that other Muslim leaders struggled to represent. In Chapter 4, I turn to the histories of ASMA and Cordoba after 9/11 and to Rauf ’s and Khan’s rapid rise in prominence as Sufi moderates. Making Sufi practices central to moderation is something that, for Rauf (who emphasizes Sufism both sincerely and strategically), is like walking a tightrope. Although

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many Americans, State Department officials and otherwise, consider Sufis to be mystical moderates, an increase in anti-Sufi invective among Muslims worldwide in the last two centuries means that associating with Sufism could compromise Rauf ’s authority as a Muslim leader, especially in the Muslim-majority countries for which his project on Islamic law is intended. As I discuss, Rauf and Khan frequently changed the description and objectives of their organizations after 9/11 in response to new political circumstances and new opportunities to expand their work. Following Muzaffer’s example immediately after the attacks that felled the World Trade Center, Rauf and Khan began to present the ASMA Society and Sufism as dedicated less to personal devotion than to apolitical cultural development and appreciation. A few years after that, with their programs enjoying a generally positive reception and Rauf and Khan forging strong ties to religious, political, and media elites, they began to focus on and acknowledge more political aspirations. Although Rauf and Khan minimized their Sufi roots and practices in the years that followed (and even renamed ASMA in 2006 so as to remove Sufism from the title), their identities as Sufi Muslims worked to their advantage with US politicians, both Republican and Democratic. In the meantime, however, as their organizations expanded and changed, many members of their original community—the Sufi devotees who gave time and money to help these institutions grow out of the fledgling stage—chafed at Rauf ’s increasing absences from the mosque and dhikr group and at aspects of his model of moderation. These dynamics expose some of the pressures and pitfalls of defining moderate Islam after 9/11—pressures that would only intensify in 2010 when the Ground Zero Mosque controversy erupted and, faced with the realities of racial and religious discrimination in the United States, Rauf and Khan found that they had only tepid support from Muslim American communities they had failed to represent or, worse, had alienated.

4 FROM SUFISM WITHO U T P OL ITIC S TO PO L ITI CS WI THO UT S U FIS M

about Islam inundated New Yorkers between 2001 and 2010, as text, images, and audio about local Muslims and American military invasions flooded city neighborhoods like late summer rains. Residents waded through these muddy waters from the moment of turning on the radio, television, or computer in the morning to the evening commute home through transit stations full of newsstands and color-coded alert warnings. Opportunities to assess Muslims also came from museum exhibits on Islamic art and culture and films about routing terrorists. Meanwhile, Muslim leaders and performers—ranging from hip-hop artists to whirling dervishes, who graced venues as diverse as subway platforms, Christian cathedrals, the Apollo Theater, and Carnegie Hall—attempted to draw fellow New Yorkers away from sensationalist depictions of radicalized Muslims and toward more varied interpretations. The ASMA Society participated in these efforts by holding events in 2002 and 2003 at three different prestigious churches. On a snowy Saturday in January 2002—just four months after the attacks on the World Trade Center—Rauf and Daisy Khan gathered an array of Muslim artists at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Their program, “Reflections at a Time of Transformation: American Muslim Artists Reach Out to New Yorkers,” featured visual art exhibits, music, poetry, and spoken-word performances. The well-heeled attendees— “affluent immigrants and the progeny of affluent immigrants,” as one observer described them—were largely prosperous Muslim professionals who wanted to

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counter the prevalent image of overly politicized Muslims by organizing cultural outreach programs rather than by making political pronouncements.1 As was the case with the first performance of Sufi dhikr at that cathedral decades earlier, UN ambassadors were in the audience on January 17, 2002; so were Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and representatives of the New York City Police and Fire Departments. WNYC radio show host Brian Lehrer served as master of ceremonies. At one point, between musical sets and as members of various religious communities conversed over samosas and tea, Rauf stepped to the podium to address the crowd. Putting the centrality of art to spiritual well-being in both a psychological and political context but refraining from overt political commentary, Rauf described the malaise he saw afflicting contemporary Muslims. “September 11th created a tidal wave of human shock and emotions, with a desire to do something about it. The most an artist can hope for is that what he or she might offer will touch the life of their fellow citizens . . . For the modern Muslim, a crisis in the area of art has contributed to perhaps the profoundest crisis Muslims face today: a crisis of the soul.”2 With this 2002 event and the ones that followed, Rauf and Khan began to shift the description and purpose of the American Sufi Muslim Association away from Sufi practice and psychology and toward cultural programming. By the next year, they explicitly planned to make such programs a means for changing Americans’ ideas about Muslims. In January 2003, ASMA cosponsored—along with a local United Methodist Church and synagogue—a theatrical performance titled Same Difference. That production, under Khan’s codirection, ran for sixteen sold-out weeks and represented commonalities among different religious New Yorkers in their responses to 9/11.3 The following June, using a grant from the Tides Foundation and partnering with Christian and Jewish congregations, as well as with the Islamic centers of New York (where Rauf served as a trustee) and Long Island, Rauf and Khan staged the “Cordoba Bread Fest”: a gathering that included a dramatic rendering of the interreligious exchanges that characterized the city of Cordoba during the twelfth century.4 As Rauf and Khan later explained, their hope with such projects was to “recreate” the “great flowering of culture, art, [and] philosophical inquiry” that intellectuals from the Abrahamic faiths once shared.5 While the purpose and format of this second 2003 event resembled ASMA’s other post-9/11 cultural programs, its name signaled yet another transition. By the time of the Cordoba Bread Fest, Rauf and Khan had already met John S. Bennett, a trustee of several interreligious organizations, the former vice pres-



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ident of a prestigious Washington, DC-based think tank, and the man with whom they would establish the Cordoba Initiative in 2004.6 With Bennett’s help, Rauf began to tailor his newest book to serve as a primer on and advertisement for the work of that more policy-oriented organization.7 Additionally, Rauf and Khan began to publically redefine ASMA’s mission and objectives again and created a new website on which to feature their new projects. Rauf and Khan would edit that website’s description of ASMA’s projects and purpose, as well as the descriptions they posted on the new Cordoba Initiative site, many times between 2004 and 2010. Combining information derived from these changes with materials gained from interviews and participant observation at Masjid al-Farah, at Rauf ’s Friday night dhikr services, and at ASMA Society and Cordoba Initiative events during the same years, I chart the institutional histories of the ASMA Society and the Cordoba Initiative in this chapter, mapping the development of their various programs and initiatives and showing how aspects of their objectives and self-presentations changed during the eight years and two wars that occurred between their first cultural event and the summer the Ground Zero Mosque debate erupted. Although Rauf and Khan had already changed focus significantly since they founded the ASMA Society, moving from Sufi practice and psychological well-being to cultural programs, their objectives and aspirations expanded again as Rauf completed his 2004 book and cofounded the Cordoba Initiative. With Bennett’s introductions to a wide array of political, religious, and business elites, Rauf soon changed from a local—albeit well-off and well-­connected— imam and Sufi shaykh into a recognized international figure. In prior years, Rauf had almost ceaselessly promoted Sufism by delivering lectures at national venues such as the Chautauqua Institution and Aspen Institute. More frequently, he did so by addressing smaller but no less high-profile audiences, such as in a September 2002 course he taught at a prestigious Manhattan cultural center titled “Mystical Islam: Taste of the Sufi Path.”8 After meeting Bennett, Rauf and Khan began to speak about and approach their work differently: as something larger and more politically significant. These budding changes were evident as early as 2003 in an address Rauf delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Rauf did not describe his work in terms of Sufi practice during that engagement. Nor, for the most part, did he discuss the cultural programs he and Khan had focused on since 9/11. Rather, introducing what would become the refrain of his 2004 book and Cordoba Initiative motto, Rauf proposed to “heal” the rift between the United

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States and Muslims worldwide within a decade, thus averting further terrorist attacks. “Reversing the legacy requires a NASA like effort,” he argued, hinting at the ambitious scope of his project and the policy-oriented focus he would soon adopt.9 Meanwhile, Khan worked with Rauf to expand ASMA’s endeavors and develop programs devoted not just to aesthetic appreciation but also to equipping young American Muslims to defend the United States and their religious traditions equally, a project that evolved out of meetings Rauf and Khan held with young activists who had asked Rauf to teach them more about Islam after 9/11.10 In 2006, once his and Khan’s reputation as Sufi moderates was well established at the State Department and elsewhere, Rauf funneled his energies primarily into his Cordoba Initiative project to evaluate the legal systems of Muslim-majority countries and Khan assumed leadership of ASMA. No longer wary of being cast as improperly political, they also again redefined both organizations’ goals to reflect the growing international focus and political nature of their work. As these developments indicate, Rauf ’s and Khan’s priorities and their narratives about Sufism and Islam continuously shifted over the course of a decade. Deemphasizing Sufism and focusing on Islam’s compatibility with American democracy and capitalism allowed them to take advantage of new opportunities and to more accurately reflect their new programs, as I discuss below. It also gave rise to new problems, however, as some of their volunteers (often members of their Sufi community) objected to ASMA’s turn away from Sufism, while others objected to what they saw as Rauf ’s overly idealistic promotion of American racial equality and democratic capitalism. I elaborate here on these changes and on how the ASMA Society and Cordoba Initiative expanded from joint self-professed “cultural and educational” organizations into two distinct politically oriented institutions that, by 2008, were almost entirely separate from the dhikr group in which they originated and the mosque Rauf still called home. In tracing this trajectory, I do not suggest that Rauf and Khan ever hid their political goals. Rather, I show how their objectives and self-presentations changed in keeping with the quickly, often dramatically, shifting challenges and opportunities that confronted them in the decade following 9/11. Initially focusing on culture rather than politics to assuage government officials’ fears was a time-worn Sufi strategy—one Rauf ’s first shaykh employed in Turkey to escape state repression. As Rauf and Khan soon learned, however, US leaders viewed Sufis much more favorably than did leaders of some other nations. With their political opportunities expanding and



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political goals evolving, it did not seem necessary to emphasize Sufism or cultural work rather than political activity—at least, not so long as that political activity resembled what US leaders defined as “moderate.” In 2010, however, when their plans to open an Islamic community center received national attention, even such purposefully moderate activity did not escape criticism.

Politics and Cultural Promotion after 9/11 The ambition and energy, as well as the transitional quality, of Rauf ’s and Khan’s endeavors in the first few years after 9/11 were evident in the variety of programs listed on ASMA’s 2004 website.There, ASMA’s reworked “mission statement” defined it not in terms of Sufism but as “an Islamic cultural and educational organization dedicated to fostering an American-Muslim identity and building bridges between American Muslims and the American public.” The organization’s new goal, described as a “philosophical objective” rather than a political one, was “to strengthen a culturally American expression of Islam based on tolerance and on cultural and religious harmony and to foster an environment in which Muslims can thrive within a pluralistic society without compromising their essential values and beliefs.”11 This was a development destined to happen, Rauf often argued—as in 2004 and 2005, when he echoed Herberg’s assimilation paradigm: When Christians first came [to America], within a couple of generations the religion assumed a different character . . . even in the Old World you had differences between German Lutherans and Swedish Lutherans, so much so that when they came here, they wouldn’t even speak to each other. The same thing with Judaism, but after a generation or two, a culturally American Judaism emerged . . . So it is my conviction that the same thing is bound to happen to the Islamic experience.12

In addition to creating a culturally American Islam, ASMA proposed to meet six “key objectives” within five years, none of which explicitly involved Sufism. Rather, Rauf and Khan framed their objectives in a way that reflected their more political understanding of the work they had undertaken since 9/11. Instead of promoting cultural appreciation alone, Rauf and Khan began to make subtle political claims about the role of culture in producing a moderate Muslim tradition. Not only would they create a “culturally American expression of Islam” that showcased Muslims’ abilities to integrate into the social fabric of

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the United States, they would encourage American Muslims to regard some aspects of other cultures—often ones that clashed with multicultural values—as inconsistent with Islamic faith and practice. Their final objective acknowledged this new approach most directly, as I discuss below, although much of the more explicitly political work proposed under that heading would be undertaken not by Muslims alone but by the interreligious Cordoba Initiative. According to their website, ASMA’s six key objectives included, first and foremost, forging “an American Muslim identity.” Second, the organization planned to train and empower young American Muslims to be spokes­persons for “a tolerant, harmonious, authentic Islam,” which meant “encouraging them to identify with the essentials of the Islamic faith that cut across cultural boundaries” (emphasis in the original). This was something ASMA had already started with a Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow program, the first meeting of which occurred in 2004 at the interreligious Garrison Institute that Bennett had founded in the Hudson Valley.13 Third, ASMA proposed to disabuse nonMuslims of their negative stereotypes about Muslims while simultaneously “dismantl[ing] myths regarding Americans” in the Muslim world. Fourth, reflecting the aesthetic appreciation work Rauf and Khan had already undertaken, ASMA would celebrate the role of Islamic art “in contributing to world civilizations” and would support contemporary Muslim artists and “their inclusion into the artistic fabric of America.” AMSA’s fifth objective—to support collective “spiritual evolution” by building “interfaith” networks based in “the common substrate of religion”—was the only one linked, implicitly, to the organization’s original Sufi agenda. ­Finally, its sixth objective, which fell under the heading of “intrafaith” endeavors (i.e., work to be done among Muslim communities) echoed the liberal political philosophy Rauf had expressed in his 2004 book and the more overt political aims that would become a hallmark of the Cordoba Initiative.14 This intrafaith objective involved amplifying “Islamic arguments demonstrating that Islamic texts, theology and law support the principles of separation of powers, justice, women’s rights, and freedom of religious practice.”15 Despite posting these newly defined goals on ASMA’s website and creating a separate page to discuss Cordoba’s more political work, the two organizations were hardly separate in 2004.16 Governed by its own articles of incorporation, which Bennett filed in his home state of Colorado,17 the Cordoba Initiative still depended on ASMA for staffing, resources, and even funding. Further, the leadership of the two organizations overlapped considerably. Not only did Khan



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serve as a founding director of Cordoba alongside Rauf, Bennett, and Julia A. Jitkoff, a sculptor who hailed from a family of financial planners and kept a home in Aspen,18 but Bennett was placed on ASMA’s website under its list of directors.19 Although he cofounded the Cordoba Initiative in 2004, Rauf did not devote the majority of his time to that organization until 2006. In the meantime, as Rauf promoted his book on Abrahamic ethics, economic progress, and public policy in front of ever more elite audiences, Sufi dervishes filled in for him at the mosque and on the local lecture circuit, drawing honoraria for ASMA while spreading the message that Sufism is moderate and authentic Islam. With many of ASMA’s other programs in process but Rauf frequently traveling, Khan also put more energy into the organization, giving up her corporate job in 2005 to work full time as ASMA’s executive director.20 Meanwhile, Bennett sought occasions to promote Cordoba’s mission of establishing peace in the Middle East and countering extremism with democratic capitalism—purposes outlined in the organization’s application for tax-exempt status—at the Aspen Institute and other elite forums.21 Benefitting from Bennett’s connections to Aspen Institute associates and from the additional notice he gained while promoting his book, Rauf embarked in the following years on an increasingly high-profile lecture tour that took him ever-greater distances from his Sufi community. Although for some time Rauf continued to participate in local interreligious events and teach classes on Sufism and Islam at local colleges, seminaries, and houses of worship, his message of common Abrahamic ethics and of the commonality between Islam and American law and capitalism eventually supplanted Sufism at both local and international venues. Yet Rauf ’s identity as a Sufi shaykh remained crucial to gaining entrée with domestic political leaders. Chris King, one of several State Department employees who engaged Rauf in international cultural diplomacy initiatives in 2006 and after, first heard Rauf speak about Abrahamic commonality in 2004 at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan, where Rauf taught classes on Sufism and was known as a progressive Sufi imam.22 Since the 1990s, as discussed in Chapter 3, US officials and defense analysts had increasingly viewed Sufis as moderate Muslims and possible allies. This trend continued after 9/11. In 2003, for example, the National Security Research Division of the RAND Corporation (a federally funded research and policy advising organization) published a report identifying Sufis as likely proponents of the “civil democratic Islam” that the United States and other world powers hoped to cultivate.23 “Sufi influence over school

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curricula, norms, and cultural life should be strongly encouraged” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the report’s author argued.24 The year after Rauf met King, another report (written in 2005 but published in 2007 by the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy) identified Sufis like Rauf—who assert Islam’s compatibility with democracy but otherwise eschew “political activism”—as “moderate” partners for countering extremists.25 The decision to progressively minimize Sufism once Rauf gained entrée into such centers of influence was not simply a strategic one. With each year that passed after 9/11, Sufi practice became less important to ASMA and Cordoba programs than did fostering cultural, political, and economic liberalism. While promoting ASMA and the Cordoba Initiative in 2004, for example, Rauf became a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100 Leaders and a participant in the C100 “West-Islamic World Dialogue” involving “business, political, religious, media and opinion leaders.”26 In 2005, Rauf also began to participate in a Council of Foreign Relations taskforce on democracy in the Arab world involving former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, in the process developing a relationship that would lead Albright to praise the Cordoba Initiative in her 2006 book.27 Meetings with former President Clinton, under whom Albright had served, soon followed. In January 2006, Clinton afforded Rauf an audience during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, during which Rauf also contributed to a debate concerning “Islam’s Challenge to Eradicate Extremism.”28 Clinton met with Rauf again that September at the Clinton Global Initiative meetings. On the latter occasion, organized by Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, a self-proclaimed progressive who had taken an interest in Rauf ’s work, the former president held private meetings involving both Rauf and Albright in discussions of religion, philanthropy, and international politics.29 Increasingly political, Rauf ’s Cordoba Initiative work was far from partisan. In fact, if anything, Rauf worked more closely with the Republican administration then in the White House than he did with Democrats. In February 2006, for example, Rauf joined Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes, a close advisor to President Bush, in a US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, as part of Hughes’ “listening tour” to improve the image of the United States in the Middle East.30 Rauf later wrote that he hoped to continue talks about Islam and international peace with members of the Bush administration.31 Such opportunities were not long in coming. Soon he was advising



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US ambassadors about Islam and hosting visiting imams who traveled to the United States from Arab countries as part of State Department programs. Although Rauf ’s new projects garnered attention more rapidly than he perhaps expected, all were in keeping with Cordoba’s primary objective as stated on its 2004 page on ASMA’s website: to “provide U.S. policy makers and the international press with informed research and critical thinking regarding ways to improve the relationship between America and the Muslim world.”32 As Rauf spread the message of global ethical commonality and economic opportunity among international political and religious elites in 2005 and 2006, Daisy Khan organized events and conferences to address ASMA’s new primary demographic: the young, cosmopolitan Muslim Americans whom she and Rauf—following Herberg’s paradigm—believed would be the future of a culturally rich and culturally American Islam. Faiz Khan echoed their message of young Muslim American cultural solidarity and their Herbergian model of generational change during these years, similarly arguing that the most important thing for Muslim Americans after 9/11 was to “get acquainted with what is authentically Islamic, and what is not.”33 Yet for him, being a culturally American observant Muslim meant being able to offer a more full-throated critique of American policies than Rauf and Daisy did, and to question government actions—even at the risk of seeming prone to conspiracy theories. As we shall see, these were positions that, for Rauf, pushed the boundaries of moderation, impelling him to police the limits of acceptable political speech within his organization.

Sufism as Necessary but Insufficient: The Limits of Critique for Moderate Muslims Like Rauf, Faiz Khan concentrated on studying Sufi psychology before the terrorist attacks of 2001.34 Raised in a heavily Jewish suburb of Manhattan, where he had memorized Hebrew songs from countless bar mitzvahs, Faiz later backpacked through North Africa and the Middle East, encountering a variety of scholars and Sufi leaders along the way. These experiences, he felt, taught him not only about the diversity of Islam and other religious traditions but also about the fundamental commonalities among them.35 After cofounding ASMA with Daisy and Rauf (though, unlike them, he was not involved in its executive operations), Faiz also began to deliver lectures about Islam and Sufism to national and international audiences. But the terrorist attacks of 2001—dur-

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ing which Faiz waited in his Queens emergency room and then a makeshift ­hospital at Ground Zero for wounded survivors who never came—and the wars that followed transformed him. Though not immediately changed, Faiz Khan eventually became more overtly political. In a 2004 interview for a book about Muslim Americans, titled American Muslim Voices, Faiz still emphasized Sufism’s centrality to Islamic practice. Additionally, though, he described his new personal goal, which was similar to the “philosophical objective” stated on ASMA’s 2004 website: to help Muslims separate un-Islamic things from those that lie at the heart of every religion. Such un-Islamic, irreligious factors, in his view, included the “cultural baggage” that immigrants—especially immigrant imams—often brought to the United States, as well as “criminal thing[s]” like terrorism.36 So far, these changes were quite similar to those his ASMA colleagues underwent. Unlike Rauf and Daisy, however, who refrained from discussing contemporary racial and economic inequalities—the persistence of which could challenge their narrative that American democratic capitalism is socially just and Islamically ideal—Faiz admitted that racism was a current issue in the United States, including among Muslims, and provided a different take on upward mobility and assimilation. Faiz realized that the experience of his parents and many other immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s—who were mainly educated professionals, not the unskilled workers of previous immigrant generations—was very different from that of most black Americans. Growing up in [Long Island, in] an upper-middle-class suburb, I was definitely different from other Muslim youths from families not so well-off. My parents were both doctors and led very busy professional lives. The Muslim scene in America is very diverse. What you have is an immigrant class that made good. They came in, a lot of educated professional engineers and doctors . . . and really lived the American dream . . . African Americans make up a large part of the American Muslim world, where the scene changes.37

Members of his parents’ generation (the generation Rauf belongs to) had good intentions, Khan believed, but “when it came to crossing the socio-ethnic lines and building an embracing community—a component of true Islam which recognizes no difference between one human being and another based on color or outward attributes—the embrace was less than robust.”38 Nevertheless, Faiz, like Rauf and Daisy, thought that second-generation American Muslims had more open outlooks than their elders: “[T]here is



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most definitely a deep-seated racist and classist element that exists amongst Indian and Pakistani immigrants toward others—particularly African Americans,” he acknowledged, but “that a priori doesn’t exist in my generation because we grew up here . . . we’re comfortable with everybody.”39 With regards to the country’s racial and socio-economic disparities, his primary strategy at that time—again, following Daisy and Rauf—was to emphasize Muslims’ commonalities with other Americans and to focus on the positive aspects of life in the United States. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on and US actions against various Muslim populations, from prisoners at Abu Ghraib to housewives targeted by domestic surveillance programs, grew increasingly repressive, that strategy no longer satisfied him. From 2004 to 2006, Faiz grew more vocal about racial and economic injustice. He did not do so when delivering khutbahs at the mosque, where he filled in for Rauf and maintained that true religion was not political, but he did in his talks with Rauf ’s other dervishes and in his writing for other audiences.40 And not only did he discuss contemporary racism and socio-economic inequalities, implicitly contradicting Rauf ’s narrative of domestic social and economic flourishing, Faiz also condemned American injustices overseas. He was particularly critical of the role of American corporations—ones Rauf lionized—in creating such injustices. In 2004, Faiz had criticized aspects of foreign policy such as the US-led movement for sanctions against Iraq. “Terrible current events, like executing policies that starve entire populations, have nothing to do with religion,” he argued that year. Trying to blunt his criticism somewhat, he asserted that such a policy, one undertaken by a small political elite, did not reflect all Americans. “It’s not a Christian thing, it’s not an American thing,” Khan asserted. “It’s a criminal thing.”41 Writing an essay in 2006 for a collection titled 9/11 and American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out, however, Faiz was much less reserved and much more explicit about his new differences from “the moderate Muslim response to terror” which, he believed, “has become an industry of its own” that failed to address political and economic abuses at home and abroad.42 Rauf had occasionally, and cautiously, criticized US foreign policy during those years as well, something that would come to haunt him during the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. Additionally, he appeared in a television advertisement in 2004 in which he and other religious leaders apologized to Muslims overseas for American abuses at Abu Ghraib, and he had tried to avert

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the surveillance and detention of Muslim Americans by participating in FBI and New York City law enforcement training programs. He never spoke publically against the activities of intelligence agencies, however—not even when members of his own congregation were detained or had their homes ransacked without search warrants.43 Further, as his work with the Cordoba Initiative intensified, Rauf increasingly affiliated with political and economic institutions and actors that Faiz saw as contributing to global social and economic inequalities and injustices—not least because of their influence in Washington. In the same essay he wrote in 2006 (published in 2007), Khan described contemporary American foreign policy as “counterfeit.” The “agendas and consequences of current US foreign policy lie squarely opposed to the principles enshrined in our American Constitution, as well as our American Declaration of Independence,” he argued. “I wish the term ‘American’ would be dropped from the foreign policy that originates on Wall Street and is enacted through Washington, DC.”44 Implicating Rauf ’s work as part of the problem rather than part of a solution to international conflict, Khan argued that going “to an Islamic scholar for a diagnosis of what happened on 9/11 and why is quite absurd” and criticized how “supposedly moderate Muslim commentators” resorted to a “good Muslim-bad Muslim dialectic” rather than engaging in informed discussions of geopolitics and economics.45 “I understand that militants exist who label themselves ‘Islamists’ and they are generally a most vile lot,” Khan told readers, but the first subject that Americans must understand in order to appreciate the reality of the terrorist attacks and US foreign policy since is “Wall Street/Corporate America/the banking industry”—all entities, in his view, that influenced policymakers for the sake of profit.46 Significantly, even while criticizing the work of organizations like ASMA and Cordoba, Khan enacted some of the principles Rauf and Daisy had tried to inculcate in the young Muslims they mentored. Not only did he appeal to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as foundations of Americanness that were in keeping with Islamic mandates, he argued that Muslim Americans—afflicted by the cultural “residue” of an immigrant inferiority complex—were hampered in their understandings of US politics and economics.47 This, he maintained, was one reason they did not demand “real answers” about 9/11 and its aftermath. But the primary reason Muslims shied away from discussing these things, he acknowledged, was fear of repercussions.48 Emulating the arguments of Rauf and Daisy in some ways even while he rejected their work, Faiz insisted that he was every bit as American as any other citizen and



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that, as such, he had the right to hold his government accountable to its founding principles, to ask questions, and to demand answers for what was done in his name and with his taxes. Faiz was far from the only Muslim American (or non-Muslim American, for that matter) to make such criticisms, but he correctly guessed that his perspective did not accord with that of Muslims identified by the State Department and defense analysts as moderate. He remained committed to Sufism—even making reference in his 2006 essay to René Guénon, the Traditionalist-­Perennialist writer popular with Rauf and Seyyed Hossein Nasr49—and, like Rauf, insisted on creating a culturally American Muslim practice that, for example, would allow men and women to shake hands rather than require them to observe strict physical separation.50 Nevertheless, Faiz’s political critique increasingly challenged the economic and political moderation defined by Rauf and by the previously marginalized religious minorities whose anti-socialist, pro-capitalist arguments served as Rauf ’s moderate template. These were not the only ways in which Faiz’s perspective provoked anxiety among his fellow Muslim Americans. Seeing abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo unfold as the United States went to war in Iraq, and cognizant of the surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and harassment of friends at the mosque—including of a young mother of two babies who also happened to be the daughter of a diplomat—Faiz began to think that the US government and members of its security apparatus were capable of just about anything. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in front of US troops in Baghdad in 2004, said that United Airlines flight 93 was “shot down” on 9/11 rather than allowed to hit an intended target—something the Pentagon redacted, asserting that Rumsfeld “misspoke”—Faiz believed him.51 After all, Vice President Dick Cheney had already acknowledged that an executive order permitting such action had been issued, an order Cheney later admitted to issuing himself.52 After that, not only did Faiz criticize the economic and political contours of Rauf ’s moderation, he began to demand the “truth” about 9/11, which he took to be something that, at the very least, US intelligence officials had allowed to happen so as to provide justification for starting wars that would result in profit for US corporations. It is unlikely that Daisy and Rauf could have sustained their relationship with Faiz—or that he would have wanted to continue his association with ASMA, given his opinion of its work—even if he had not publically questioned the US government’s account of what transpired before, during, and after 9/11.

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Given that Faiz often filled in for Rauf at the mosque, served as a spokesperson for the ASMA Society, and had begun to share his thoughts about 9/11 with other members of Rauf ’s Sufi community, his actions presented a growing threat to ASMA’s moderate status. By the end of 2006, Rauf not only dismissed Faiz from his position as an assistant imam at the mosque, he also instructed his Sufi dervishes to cease having any contact with him. Then, in 2007, all mention of Faiz Khan was removed from ASMA’s website. The reasons for this significant disruption were not always apparent to other members of Rauf ’s community, many of whom thought of “Dr. Faiz” as a close friend. For example, Dean, a white, middle-aged convert, believed the break was due to the fact that Faiz had questioned Rauf ’s status as a leader of the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufis, since Rauf rarely focused on Sufism anymore and had taken hand with a different shaykh.53 This interpretation may have been due to the fact that Dean also bristled at the capitalism Rauf and Daisy promoted and saw nothing remarkable about objecting to that aspect of their work. But, while the reasons for the break may have been less than transparent, the effect was unmistakable: as Rauf, increasingly absent from his community, urged his dervishes not to associate with one of their other mentors, some community members began to question his injunctions and even their own reliance on him. Needing more guidance than Rauf could provide in person, they gradually began to take more responsibility over the mosque and dhikr services that they held without him. Like Faiz, some of these other dervishes also took Rauf and Daisy at their word about being fully Muslim and fully American. Yet the ways they put such teachings into practice in Rauf ’s absence—while less threatening to Rauf ’s moderate status than Faiz’s activism—did not always accord with what their imam intended. Even before loosing Faiz Khan, ASMA’s and Cordoba’s many expanding ventures began to require more labor than Rauf and Daisy could provide with the help of just their Sufi volunteers. After hiring their first full-time staff person in 2004, ASMA began to bring on unpaid interns in 2005.54 These interns and Rauf ’s dervishes together organized and staffed conferences for ASMA’s Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT) program and other events, even as those programs gradually pulled Rauf and Daisy further away from their Sufi community and diverted their attention from American Muslims, refocusing it on international audiences. Unlike the 2004 MLT conference, for example, at which Rauf had emphasized the common ethics and historical trajectory of American Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim communities, the 2006 and later gatherings—held outside



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of the United States—were convened to “nurture a global Muslim leadership that employs Islamic and pluralistic values to enhance peace and tolerance.”55 Their increasingly global focus was reflected in other programs Rauf and Daisy Khan developed in 2006, as well. These included the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE), initially conceptualized as a forum to “empower American Muslim women” but ultimately undertaken as an international project to provide information about and to Muslim women globally. By the time of the first WISE conference, Khan had added to this the “shura council,” a program to train female scholars as Islamic legal authorities.56 Their new programs also included Rauf ’s Shariah Project, which he first presented as one to help “moderate Muslims” reduce conflict and promote democracy in Muslim-majority countries but later described as an international effort to help Muslim legal scholars and heads of state “determine the proper balance” between “institutions of political power and authority, on the one hand . . . and institutions of religious power and authority, on the other—the Muslim equivalent of the religion-state relationship.”57 These 2006 programs ultimately came to define ASMA and Cordoba—in no small part because they were the ones for which Khan and Rauf got the most funding—and, again, moved Rauf and Khan further away from their initial objectives and original community. I return to dynamics within Rauf ’s Sufi community in more detail in the chapters that follow. Proceeding with the histories of ASMA and Cordoba in the meantime, though, I show how Rauf and Khan continually tried to balance various aspects of their work so as to maintain their claims to moderation while making ever more political pronouncements.

Interfaith Allies, Political Positioning, and Cordoba’s Independence The year 2006 was pivotal for Rauf and Khan, as ASMA began to receive grants for its WISE project from major foundations. Among other things, these grants allowed ASMA and Cordoba to move in 2007 into professional offices in a building known informally as the “God Box” but formally as the Interchurch Center, a towering edifice on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that houses the National Council of Churches and several Rockefeller family foundations, among other things, thus functioning as a nexus of New York City’s religious and philanthropic worlds. As WISE grew from a US women’s forum to one involving hundreds of women internationally, it became for ASMA what Rauf ’s

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Shariah Project (later called the Shariah Index Project) was turning into for the Cordoba Initiative: the organization’s most time-consuming program, as well as an indispensible source of funding. These developments, which coincided with their increasing willingness to take certain kinds of political positions, would cause Rauf and Khan to alter their organizations and ambitions yet again. Even as Khan organized cultural and social events and symposia for young Muslim leaders in 2004 and 2005, she had begun to create relationships with prominent women’s religious organizations, including the Sister Fund (oil heiress Helen LaKelley Hunt’s feminist religious philanthropic foundation), which provided ASMA with early grants and with links to other important activists and institutions. A Sister Fund seed grant, for example, helped Khan attract the attention of another foundation, the Global Fund for Women, which gave ASMA $15,000 in 2006 and helped to publicize WISE’s inaugural event.58 That meeting, a November conference at the Westin Hotel in Times Square, would gather over one hundred Muslim women from around the globe—authors, rights activists, lawyers, politicians, and scholars, among others—“to discuss global Muslim women’s issues, assert our rights through the use of and in accordance with Islamic law, and build a coherent movement that empowers and connects Muslim women everywhere.”59 Just a month before convening it, ASMA and Cordoba turned a crucial corner when ASMA gained a major grant from one of the nation’s foremost private foundations and entry into a selective network of elite foundation grantees. In October 2006, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) granted ASMA $70,000 for WISE and for Rauf ’s Shariah Project; it would grant $100,000 more in October of 2007 for the WISE and MLT initiatives. Both grants came as part of the RBF’s annual disbursement to “Peace and Security” programs dealing with “Muslim and Western Understanding.” Cordoba also received a one-year grant of $30,000 for general operating support in 2006 under the same rubric, though it still drew most of its resources from ASMA at that time.60 Greater support for ASMA projects followed. The Henry Luce Foundation provided ASMA with a donation of $25,000 in 2006 to support Khan’s first WISE event, then issued a second, smaller grant of $10,000 in 2007 to support her project for training Muslim women leaders in Islamic law. Over the next five years, Luce support for WISE increased exponentially, ultimately totaling nearly $400,000.61 During this period, ASMA also gained the attention of the C ­ arnegie Corporation, among other donors, and Cordoba began drawing major funding and other types of support from the Malaysian government.62



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In the meantime, with Khan concentrating on WISE and Rauf working closely with Muslim legal authorities from around the globe, the two changed ASMA’s name to reflect the activities for which it was increasingly funded. Retaining its acronym—and the mission statement and objectives posted on its website, which would not change for another few years—the American Sufi Muslim Association became the American Society for Muslim Advancement at the end of 2006, a more explicitly rights-oriented organization in name and purpose than it was previously.63 Unlike other Muslim American rights organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (ASMA’s neighbor in the God Box), Khan focused not on the due process or privacy denied Muslims in America during this era of mass surveillance but on rights denied Muslims—particularly Muslim women—elsewhere.64 Between 2006 and 2010, as they deemphasized their Sufi roots and activities and grew increasingly secure in the support they received from private funders and allies of other religious traditions—for example, the two received the James Park Morton Interfaith Award in 2006, which they shared with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, among others65—Rauf and Khan began to speak more explicitly and frequently about their evolving political objectives. Their political speech was still consonant with the “moderate” Islam for which Rauf had made headlines in 2004 and for which they received grants: an Islam “that embraces the values of Western democracy, carries within it a love of America . . . calls on Muslims to respect other faiths,” and endeavors to help Muslim women combat patriarchal cultures and institutions.66 Or, as Rauf put it in his 2007 contribution to a debate over the meaning of “moderate Islam,” their version consisted of promoting in Muslim majority countries what the Abrahamic ethic had given rise to in the United States: the creation and expansion of an “Islamic human rights doctrine” and “Islamic democratic capitalism.”67 Yet, as the years passed and their status as moderates came to seem unshakable, Rauf and Khan eventually ceased allying with non-Muslim leaders for protection and cover when speaking overtly about politics. The continually changing Cordoba Initiative website, launched at an independent address in 2006, gave evidence of these shifts and of Rauf ’s waning caution in acknowledging political objectives. At first, Rauf and other Cordoba leaders consistently emphasized the multireligious nature of the organization— an emphasis that partly served to assuage Americans’ fears about the political mission of even a self-professed “moderate” Muslim. In addition to providing biographies of Cordoba leaders such as Rauf (chairman of the board), Khan (a

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trustee), and Bennett (executive director), the website identified ten scholars and religious leaders from non-Muslim traditions who served on Cordoba’s interreligious advisory board, including Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and noted religion writer Karen Armstrong.68 Further, Cordoba’s mission statement still significantly echoed ASMA’s at that time by emphasizing cultural and educational work, except Cordoba’s directors made sure to point out that their efforts would be “multi-faith,” not just ­Muslim-led.69 “No single religion’s followers may hold a majority of voting seats on its board of directors,” the website assured prospective donors, partners, and other inquirers. Rather, “mainstream American Muslim leaders” would work “in partnership with Jewish and Christian leaders,” through an interreligious system of checks and balances, to foster “civil dialogue,” promote “intercultural understanding,” and prevent “the horrors of another September 11.”70 In addition to preventing further terror attacks, Cordoba’s leaders pledged to manage the threat immoderate Muslims posed to existing political and economic powers. We will overcome the “distrust and animosity that plague the Islamic world’s relationship with the United States,” they promised, an animosity that constitutes “today’s greatest single threat to international security and the world’s economy.”71 Emphasizing these themes again under a portion of the website devoted to Cordoba’s “Uniqueness & Need,” the organization’s officers reiterated the “substantial global threat” of terrorism to economic security and underlined Rauf ’s special qualifications for undertaking such endeavors: “While many excellent attempts have been made to improve relations between Islamic countries and the West and to further peace in the Middle East, rarely have politically moderate, mainstream American Muslims helped initiate and lead . . .”72 Despite the caution Rauf exercised when creating this first independent Cordoba Initiative website, he and Khan both became more open to speaking about policy and to acknowledging political affiliations and objectives as soon as 2007. In January of that year, for example, they joined a diverse bipartisan group of academics, policy experts, politicians, business people, philanthropists, and religious leaders to urge greater US diplomacy with “the Muslim world,” as well as the cultivation of more “moderate behavior” therein.73 “The Leadership Group on U.S.-Muslim Relations”—which involved Madeline ­Albright, among others, and had financial support from several private foundations, as well as from the American Petroleum Institute—first convened at the Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York



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and then initiated an eighteen-month investigation into how to improve relations between the United States and Muslims worldwide. The assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, in December of 2007 only seemed to deepen the need for such work, as Vali Nasr, a member of the group and Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s son, explained on CNN that month.74 These efforts, the group concluded in its report, should include initiatives ranging from disaster relief to private business-led development.75 The following year, Rauf—comfortable enough to take explicitly political positions on his own—completely restructured the Cordoba Initiative. Not only did he file new bylaws and redesign the website to present himself as the organization’s sole leader and founder—excising all mention of Bennett, Khan, and the interreligious advisory board—he removed from the website and bylaws all material on the “multi-faith” nature of the organization.76 Rauf even reworded the Initiative’s mission statement, explaining that its new goal was to “achieve a tipping point in Muslim-West relations within the next decade” by “leverage[ing] contacts in influential positions within the Muslim World and the West.”77 While the new website still gestured at interreligious endeavors, promising in the mission statement to “bring back the atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect” characteristic of twelfth-century Cordoba, Rauf—now enjoying support from both the Malaysian government and the US State Department—no longer felt he must rely on support from non-Muslims to prove his moderate status. Rather than pursue further interreligious collaboration, he concentrated primarily on supporting Cordoba’s international programs and on developing his project to evaluate the Islamic authenticity of various countries’ legal systems. Over the next few years, Rauf continued to draw honoraria for occasional lectures he delivered for ASMA, and he continued to identify himself as the imam of a mosque twelve blocks from the former World Trade Center, even as he worked primarily from his office in Malaysia. In the meantime, Daisy Khan— who had previously been less openly political than Rauf—maintained ASMA’s involvement in State Department cultural exchange programs and spoke more explicitly about her own political objectives. In February 2007, for example, she undertook her first State Department speaking tour. During that trip, she traveled through Germany, continually reiterating the message that American and Muslim values do not conflict but rely on “ethics that are common to both.”78 In the years that followed, Khan also became less guarded about the political valences of her WISE project.

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Khan’s caution in acknowledging political objectives was long a matter of strategy, in part designed to avoid drawing attention from Muslims who might oppose her women’s rights work. Discussing WISE with a group of activists in 2008, for example, she acknowledged that she had been “very careful from the very beginning not to present it as a western agenda, feminist agenda. I’ve said it’s a social justice movement which is very much connected to Islamic law, that’s the banner I’ve been waving.” When working to advance Muslim women’s rights in non-Western countries, she argued, “we can’t go in and say ‘this is a human rights violation stated in the UN charter’ they won’t listen to this, it falls on deaf ears because they think it’s a western imposition, but if we say ‘there’s a verse in the Quran that says you can’t do this because it’s wrong, it’s a sin,’ people hear it very differently.” Also, because she sought to involve a range of women in her now-global project (from secularists to traditionalists), she explained, “I’m using the moderate path, the middle road” and “inviting everybody to join forces.”79 Despite this intentionally cautious approach, Khan altered the name of her project at the end of 2008 to something more overtly political. Retaining WISE’s acronym, as she had with ASMA, Khan changed the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity—the latter term indicating fairness and ownership, connoting a parity more economic than political—to the more politically explicit Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality. The very next year—after convening the second WISE conference in Malaysia, where Rauf connected her to an official in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs who offered support if Khan promised to pressure Malaysian religious authorities on women’s issues80—Khan turned to the language of human rights that she had previously regarded as too provocative. Describing her work on the new website created especially for WISE in 2009, Khan asserted that “genderbased inequality is a global human rights issue that transcends culture, religion and socio-economic status. Though such problems as domestic violence, inadequate access to technology, poor education, and lack of economic opportunity are widespread, Muslim women in particular confront the limitations of discrimination and inequality.”81 No longer wary of acknowledging this perspective before Muslim audiences, Khan included the same pronouncement on the Arabic-language portion of her website.82 Further, she began to echo more explicitly Rauf ’s argument that once Muslims—including Muslim women—created a culturally American Islam, they could serve as a beacon lighting the way toward re-



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form elsewhere. Khan’s confidence in taking such overt political positions was surely influenced by a grant she received in 2009, ASMA’s largest ever. That year, the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s MG3 Fund gave ASMA one million euros to help accomplish the third of the U.N.’s millennium development goals: gender equality and the empowerment of women.83 Yet that substantial grant was not entirely responsible for changing Khan’s strategy or willingness to engage in political speech and activity. Rather, even before receiving these funds, Khan’s faith that her work would be accepted both as moderate and as authentically Islamic was buoyed by an unprecedented political development. Her belief in 2008 and 2009 that the United States was changing for the better was palpable, as I discuss below, and it contributed to her and Rauf ’s confidence about the future of their endeavors—including their Islamic community center project. But it also blinded them to the severity of racism and Islamophobia in the United States, leaving them unprepared in 2010 for conservative politicians’ reactions to their political speech and projects.

The Promise and Pitfalls of Politics In January 2008, I visited ASMA to interview Khan about the organization’s programmatic changes over the preceding five years. When I entered the new offices at the Interchurch Center on a snowy afternoon, an intern told me Khan needed time to finish a previous task and directed me to the reception area. Khan eventually emerged in her usual attire: one of her many elegant pantsuits that straddled the line between business suit and salwar kameez, a style of dress common to India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir region in which Khan was born. After welcoming me, she asked to put off our interview for another half hour as ASMA was dealing with an unfolding crisis in the Netherlands. Khan was in the midst of a phone call with one of the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow lawyers there, strategizing about the organization’s response to a soon-to-be-released inflammatory film about the Qur’an. Meanwhile, a staff member and intern were busy organizing the second WISE conference, then planned for June of 2008 in Malaysia. When we finally sat down to talk in Khan’s office, I asked her about A ­ SMA’s changing objectives and evolution into an international organization. As a result of their expanding educational efforts and growing popularity, Khan acknowledged, she and Rauf had redefined ASMA’s goals. Still, she insisted, ASMA’s current activities were ones she and Rauf had always hoped to undertake. Without

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mentioning Sufism, Khan framed ASMA’s history and purpose in terms of her own personal mission after immigrating to the United States to find an authentic Islamic practice not tainted by the residue of a foreign culture. There were mosques that were established along ethnic lines. They were established along cultural lines, cultural mores . . . and I couldn’t adjust in those places. So, it was important to me that when I grew up, that I established something for the sake of those who were coming after me. So that was the thrust of my own aspiration. I had a regular corporate career. It’s something that I really wanted to do for the sake of the community. So, when I married Imam Feisal . . . eleven years ago . . . he was already an imam of a mosque. And the mosque had certain constraints because we couldn’t do the kinds of programming that we wanted to do then. As you know, it’s just a storefront mosque. It doesn’t have the space. So, at that time, I wanted to really keep it to what was now the newer generation . . . and I was beginning to know a lot of them through him. So, we decided that we should establish a separate 501(c)(3) [nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation] that would be a house for people, a house that would have an American cultural expression to it. And it would also be very authentically Islamic in terms of its practices . . . so that it would also be very inviting to nonMuslims and there would be interfaith dialogue. It would really be a new kind of a center that was more an American Muslim center than a Muslim center built around a certain ethnicity. And also this was Manhattan, it was a nucleus of the world Muslim community here. So we wanted to cater to many different nationalities. So we established the organization at that time in 1997 and it was primarily geared to two things: one, Muslims getting to know their own faith and understanding their own faith and navigating the issue of modernity and faith especially because now they’re living in a Western context. So, we [were] proving ourselves as a role model for them you know. And so then that was kind of like the inreach work. And then, a little bit of outreach work where non-Muslims [got] to know Muslim life and who Muslims were. So, this was really the major—the only—thrust that we had.84

Khan went on to explain how the 2001 terrorist attacks had caused them to shift to three primary fields of activity: providing a consistent resource for national and international media, preparing young Muslims to serve in community development through the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow program, and



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raising awareness about Muslim women’s rights as well as funds to train Muslim women jurists through WISE. The focus of ASMA, Khan acknowledged, was less local than previously, and increasingly national and international. When I asked about Sufism, which Khan still had not mentioned, she answered that the Sufi group was important, but that she and Rauf always had plans for something more: Even when the dhikr group was going on, there were a lot of mosques that would invite [Rauf] to lecture. There would be classes that we would hold for younger Muslims, who were not part of the dhikr group. So the dhikr group was a small part of a, you know, like a sustainer for those people, who wanted to go deep into their faith. But that was not the only reason for [the ASMA Society] because we knew that the dhikr group cannot appeal to the broader segment of society. Even though it was built around, you know, a nucleus—the nucleus of the community at that time was primarily the dhikr group. But, you know, communities grow and organizations grow and you take on more things.

In this interview, Khan presented ASMA’s 2008 programs as inherent in the original vision for the organization. Even though she, Rauf, and Faiz Khan did not initially have these specific projects in mind when they founded ASMA in 1997—or, at least, did not include them in the activities listed on the organization’s 1997 application for tax-exempt status—Khan believed such work was in keeping with the original ideas that had inspired them over a decade before. In 2009, she changed ASMA’s website once again to reflect this. Under “Our Mission,” the website described ASMA as “a New-York based nonprofit organization founded in 1997 to elevate the discourse on Islam and foster environments in which Muslims thrive” by “strengthening an authentic expression of Islam based on cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.” Under a section of the site devoted to ASMA’s history, the website acknowledged that change had transpired and provided justification, although it still did not disclose ASMA’s original aim of promoting Sufism. “We have continually adapted our programs and strategies, while remaining faithful to our core mission,” it read. “ASMA is shaping and inspiring a truly transformative movement. We are proud to play one of the most critical roles for the 21st Century.”85 Despite the changes Rauf and Khan made to ASMA and Cordoba, what remained consistent during much of the first decade after 9/11 was their insistence

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on situating Muslims within the narrative of American economic opportunity, ethical commonality, and eventual assimilation Rauf borrowed from a liberal Jewish sociologist (Will Herberg) and a conservative Catholic activist (Michael Novak). In her work as an advocate for Muslim women’s empowerment, and in her role as ASMA’s primary spokesperson after 2006, Khan adopted Rauf ’s rendition of Herberg’s immigrant narrative and placed herself within it—not just in personal interviews, such as the one she gave me in 2008, but also in the national media. In an interview with Sojourners magazine in 2009 (partly derived from a 2008 post she contributed to the Newsweek-Washington Post On Faith blog), for example, Khan argued that Muslims in America struggled for acceptance in the same ways previous religious groups had. “Take, for example, American Catholics and Jews, long considered outsiders, but now generally existing within the mainstream of American society. This process is already underway with American Muslims, and it will only continue . . . Just as our nation has transformed from a ‘Christian’ nation to a ‘Judeo-Christian’ nation, we must now recognize our commonly shared Abrahamic ethics and embrace Islam as an equal member of this Abrahamic ethical tradition.” Tailoring this message to her own work, Khan placed WISE in a history of religious women’s activism, arguing that “the American women of the WISE movement now walk in the giant footsteps of our earlier Christian sisters,” including Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony.86 Khan’s belief in this narrative and her greater willingness to speak politically in 2009, like Rauf ’s, was due to in part to the positive reception her work with ASMA had received among leaders of non-Muslim religious traditions, as well as the favor her organization and the WISE program enjoyed with private foundations and political elites, national and international. Such recognition suggested that Muslim acceptance and achievement in the United States and Europe was a real possibility, even in the first decade after the terrorist attacks and as the United States waged war in multiple Muslim-majority nations. As mentioned earlier, though, Rauf and Khan also drew tremendous encouragement from an unprecedented political development: the election to the presidency of a man, as Khan noted in an exuberant On Faith post, “with the middle name ‘Hussein’ who openly draws upon his Christian faith to drive his politics.”87 Khan did not mince words in that 2008 blog post when, two days after Americans elected to the presidency a candidate whom some believed to be



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Muslim, she described what the election revealed about America’s role as the world’s leading nation. Obama inspires the universal dreams of all humans—that of audacious hope, of idealistic (and otherwise unrealistic) optimism, and of far-fetched success and transformation—dreams most powerfully represented in America and “the American dream” . . . He is “the shattered glass ceiling” embodied, the “yes we can (collectively)” exemplified. A new and unprecedented standard has been created. The most power­ ful nation in the world has overwhelmingly elected a man who, like America, defies ethnic labels, geographic limitations, or traditional class categorizations . . . His election is both a seminal moment in American history and a historic event for the world. It represents the abandonment of an American exceptionalism characterized by resistance to global cooperation and community. Instead, it celebrates an American exceptionalism defined by our truly unique history, exemplified in the indelible immigrant spirit of hard work, ingenuity, and leadership.

Khan’s reflections on Obama’s election are illuminating not just for the encouragement she drew from his election—something that allowed her to feel more accepted, more American, and more able to speak freely and politically than, perhaps, she had felt since the events of 9/11—but also for the tensions they reveal in her understanding of the United States. Like Rauf, Khan generally presents America as a land of racial equality and economic opportunity where “hard work” and “ingenuity” (particularly on the part of immigrants) translates into upward mobility. Obama’s election, for her, proved that the “glass ceiling” had been shattered and that members of all ethnic, racial, religious, and economic groups have the same chances for success. At the same time, Khan began her post by recognizing that the hope Obama inspired is in an American dream that is “idealistic” and even “unrealistic”—an American dream of racial and economic mobility that could even be described as “far-fetched.” It is perhaps not coincidental that Khan wrote that description in the autumn of 2008. The year was notable not only for the election of a biracial man whom many describe as the nation’s first “black” president, but because it was when many people in the United States began to feel the pain of what would become a devastating economic recession. While the election seemed to promise that anything was possible for anyone in America, the recession would— for many—call into question the moral and social supremacy of American

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c­ apitalism and prove just how little mobility most Americans actually have. While Khan inadvertently acknowledged America’s imperfections in her celebratory political post, Rauf would do no such thing—at least, not when it came to contemporary domestic policy. A few months before the market turmoil of 2008 began, I interviewed Rauf by phone, as he was then mostly working from his office in Malaysia. On an unseasonably warm April evening in New York (morning in Kuala Lumpur), I asked Rauf to clarify his thoughts about democratic capitalism. “You’ve read my book,” Rauf responded, referring me back to the principles he had asserted there. It remained his belief that American democratic capitalism, at least in its ideal form, is a productive fusion of free enterprise and moral restraint characterized by the Abrahamic ethic and that it should be emulated worldwide.88 Less than a year after my interview with Rauf, economists, historians, reporters, and even the International Monetary Fund began using the term “Great Recession” to refer to the recent economic downturn caused largely by America’s deregulated banking industry, the longest downturn since World War II and the most severe since the Great Depression.89 Still, preoccupied with international affairs during that time, Rauf reiterated his narrative of American political and economic leadership in one of his own contributions to the Newsweek-Washington Post On Faith blog. Mentioning that he had just returned from a week of discussions with Iranian officials about Iran’s upcoming elections, Rauf emphasized his support for the newly elected American president (“my president, Barack Hussein Obama”), heralded Obama’s upcoming speech to address “the Muslim world” from Cairo, and praised Obama’s efforts to ensure American-led economic development in the Middle East so as to foster peace and reconciliation between Arab states and Iran, Sunnis and Shi‘a and “Muslims and the West.”90 Although such political and economic pronouncements still sounded moderate to the ears of most American political leaders in 2009, other audiences were less convinced. I refer not to political conservatives here—those who would seize on the 2010 Ground Zero Mosque controversy for the sake of electoral gain—but to other New York City Muslim leaders who also engaged in political activism with very different aims and (usually) before much smaller audiences. While many black American Muslim leaders also drew encouragement and inspiration from Obama’s election, most were not as sanguine as Rauf and Khan about the opportunities and equality available to black Americans. Nor could they agree with Rauf ’s insistence on the justice of American political



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and economic arrangements—particularly not, as I discuss in the final section of this chapter, with his argument that the global spread of democratic capitalism would diffuse the grievances that fueled terrorism abroad, just as it had improved the lives of black Americans and dampened the militancy of black nationalist movements. While Rauf and Khan collected accolades and awards for their programs in the decade after 9/11, other Muslim leaders struggled to meet the needs of their less affluent populations, including for basic resources. These dynamics would make it difficult for such leaders to defend Rauf and Khan in 2010 when, despite years of extremely careful political positioning, their moderation was called into question.

Aggressive Jihad and Economic Abundance— Moderation in Question Writing in 2004—before the idea of a black president seemed feasible to most—Rauf saw the appointment of Colin Powell, a black man, to the position of secretary of state as proof that black Americans enjoyed opportunities equal to those of white Americans.91 He acknowledged in his book that black Americans had not always benefited from the progressive assimilation and acceptance immigrant populations enjoyed. As a result of being deprived of the benefits of democratic capitalism during large periods of American history, black Americans (and other similarly deprived populations at other times and places) had developed an aggressive tendency, he claimed. And in this aggressive tendency—one that distorts the true nature of jihad—Rauf located the roots of both fundamentalism and suicide terrorism. Authentic jihad, Rauf opined in 2004, is “the struggle to establish a human society that is the good society—one that authentically reflects the Abrahamic ethic, especially its second commandment” (loving one’s neighbor) expressed in democratic capitalism.92 Fundamentalist jihad is very different. Mixing his Sufiinflected rendition of democratic capitalism with theories about group psychology, evolutionary biology, and game theory, Rauf attempted to render Muslims (even those who had committed violence) more sympathetic to non-Muslim audiences and to explain why some people (including black Americans in certain periods of American history) seemed to regard violence as an effective means for achieving their aims. According to Rauf, multiple kinds of aggression—from the violence generally categorized as fundamentalist to the particular action of suicide

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bombings—could be understood as natural sociological and psychological phenomena activated by situations of stress.93 Just as the honeybee sacrifices itself to defend the hive, he argued, people governed by unexamined habits, customs, or evolutionary impulses sometimes resort to aggression to defend their communities.94 Rather than return violence with more violence, the key to creating global good was twofold: making both value systems and social systems more liberating and ethical. While proper religious practice—shorn of cultural impediments—could help reform communal values, the exportation of democratic capitalism would contribute to economic opportunity in developing nations, thus lifting populations out of the poverty that left them feeling defenseless. The United States had already proved that such progress was possible, Rauf claimed, equating the creation of antidiscrimination laws and affirmative action programs with the achievement of social and economic parity. Black Americans were a case in point: For example, the violent Black Panther movement in the 1960s represented this kind of aggression in the context of the civil rights movement, seeking the defense of American blacks against white people who had imposed the historical injustice of slavery (and later discrimination) upon them. But after President Lyndon Johnson pushed through civil rights legislation, and American blacks made progress in their battle for civil rights, legal and voting barriers fell, affirmative action plans were created, and racial discrimination against blacks became a violation of law. As all this occurred, black militancy inevitably waned.95

Though widely hailed as moderate by many American elites, Rauf ’s view did not reflect the perspectives of other New York City Muslim leaders, such as Imam Siraj Wahhaj of Masjid al-Taqwa in Brooklyn, imams at the Malcolm Shabbaz mosque on 116th Street in Harlem, or others who believe that the affluence of American elites—born of the capitalism that Rauf depicts as the engine of equality—often involves the twinned projects of international resource accumulation and domestic labor exploitation, thus impoverishing many communities in the United States and abroad.96 Known as the “drug-fighting Muslim” for his 1980s efforts to rid his poverty-stricken neighborhood of crack dealers, Siraj Wahhaj has long been unabashed about the ongoing economic marginalization and even political “persecution of blacks.”97 Speaking after 9/11 about Muslim Americans’ opinions of the United States, Wahhaj sometimes tempers his political rhetoric. Nevertheless, he remains resolute about the injustices



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black Americans face. “You might hear some anti-American flavor a little bit,” in the stories American Muslims tell, he admits, “but not because they hate America.” Rather, he points out, “our civil rights leaders [also] spoke about the injustices of America” from a desire to improve the country, not just from animosity toward it. And “you hear it in that way especially [from] African Americans. If that makes us militant, then we’re militant.”98 Writing in 2004, Rauf was not completely unconcerned about inequality and racism, but his book and work with the Cordoba Initiative prioritized America’s role in overcoming such problems in Muslim-majority nations. Hoping to explain how and why the situation of Muslims in less developed countries could be improved, Rauf created a narrative about American opportunity and abundance that elided the needs and experiences of those Muslim Americans suffering from the disastrous combined effects of institutionalized racism and neoliberal economic policies: the simultaneous expansion of free markets, diminution of social welfare programs, and deregulation of major industries, including banks.99 It is important to recognize here that Rauf did not create this selective narrative because of bad intentions. In fact, by explaining the seeming threat posed by black activists (and other Muslims at other times or places) as a natural product of self-protective instincts, Rauf attempted to defend and humanize those who had been or are subjected to racism. By treating black protest as if it belonged to the past, however, Rauf consigned racism to the past along with it. Other Muslim leaders in the city, as noted, were less optimistic about the racial and economic progress American capitalism could deliver. Even before the recession, which had a disproportionate effect on black Americans and erased, according to postrecession studies, “three decades of economic gains” among that population,100 these leaders created organizations and networks to address social and economic distress in their neighborhoods. In 2005, Imams Talib Abdur Rashid and Siraj Wahhaj, among others, created the Muslim Alliance in North America to serve inner cities across the country— especially homeless populations and current or former prisoners—and to share education and resources useful in creating political change. They modeled their organization (known as MANA) on the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), a multiracial Muslim organization created by young people living in Chicago’s inner city in 1997 to “address violence, poverty, and decay” in their neighborhood.101 The 2008 death of W. D. Mohammed—who had mentored Siraj Wahhaj and had been scheduled to speak at MANA’s 2008 convention— briefly propelled MANA’s leaders into greater public prominence. Nevertheless,

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this increased standing did not gain MANA (or IMAN) nearly the attention among non-Muslim American elites that ASMA and Cordoba enjoyed. Rather than petition politicians to extend US economic and social systems around the world, these Muslim leaders—several of whom felt marginalized after 9/11, as US officials increasingly partnered with Arab and South Asian Muslim spokespersons—spent the years before and during the Great Recession organizing community service programs to address the needs of people who, they felt, had not enjoyed the same upward mobility as had many Muslim immigrants. As discussed in Chapter 2, such service projects had long been a way for Muslim Americans, like previously marginalized religious minorities, to lobby for social acceptance and to prove their moderation. During the summer of 2010, as their plans to open Cordoba House attracted international criticism, Rauf and Khan took notice of this trend. Stunned by the negative reaction to their project after enjoying so many years of acceptance—and after having received approval for it from the local Manhattan governing board charged with overseeing development—Khan gave voice to her surprise and disillusionment. “When will Muslims be accepted as plain old Americans?” she asked.102 Staff at Newsweek, who considered the two spokespersons for moderation, were indignant. “Figures from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump blithely conflated the peaceful Sufi strain of Islam practiced by Imam Rauf with the terrible deeds perpetrated by the twisted zealots of Al Qaeda on 9/11,” they wrote.103 No longer publically emphasizing their Sufism, and not generally engaged in service endeavors akin to those of black American Muslim leaders, Khan and Rauf would nevertheless cite both Sufism and service as proof of their moderation once some of their previous political pronouncements—especially a comment Rauf made on CBS’s 60 Minutes during one of his less guarded moments in 2001, in which he called US policies “an accessory to the crime that happened” on 9/11—came back to haunt them. Even these efforts at reemphasizing their moderation would rankle some other local Muslim leaders, however, as the services that Rauf, Khan, and their Cordoba House partners planned to provide resembled the cultural and educational programs offered at places such as Manhattan’s affluent Jewish Community Center (JCC), not those desperately needed by New York City populations in financial or social distress. The criticism and suspicion Rauf and Khan faced in and after 2010 raise ­important questions about the limits of American tolerance and about the lengths Muslims must go in order to qualify as “moderate” or to simply be tol-



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erated in the United States. I return to the role Rauf and Khan played in the Islamic community center debate and what criticism of that project reveals in Chapter 7. Before examining the tumultuous events of 2010, however, I examine the life of Rauf ’s mosque and Sufi community—which included those who would purchase the property for the downtown Islamic center—during the years of his increasing absences. As mentioned previously, many of Rauf ’s dervishes welcomed his argument that they were both authentically Muslim and authentically American, and that these two parts of their lives did not conflict. Nevertheless, without Rauf personally available to guide them, his dervishes sometimes interpreted his teachings and lived their Islam in ways that Rauf did not quite intend.

5 T HE MICRO -PO LITIC S O F MO DERATI ON

AT T H E E N D O F F R I D AY J U M ‘A H P R AY E R S O N E F E B R U A R Y , a controversy erupted at Masjid al-Farah. The disagreement was over the number of rak‘at (cycles of prayer) performed at the end of the service. Tensions over whether to perform two (the obligatory number) or four had been building for some time within this congregation—home to Senegalese street vendors, Pakistani cab drivers, Wall Street traders of various nationalities, and a handful of American converts—and Rauf was away, unable to provide guidance at that moment. Rauf ’s custom, followed by the assistant imams, was to combine jum‘ah prayers (which replace noontime, or dhuhr, prayers on Fridays) with ‘asr (the fourth of the daily prayers) into a cycle of four rak‘at. The practice was helpful to those who commuted or traveled often and could not find a suitable prayer space while in transit. Because such combining is unconventional (though not unprecedented) for Sunni Muslims, many of those gathered on Fridays would leave after only two, creating a bit of disorder as they tried to squeeze through ranks of tightly packed worshippers or step over those in mid-prostration. Women visiting the mosque would often glance at me, bewildered, when the third rak‘ah began. During the first few years of my fieldwork, which lasted from 2004 until 2010 and involved attending jum‘ah regularly, the tiny storefront mosque saw a tremendous increase in worshipers. Frequently overflowing on two floors during Friday prayers, it went from one service each week to two and finally, after the nearby Warren Street mosque closed, to three—and still could not accommodate all who wanted to pray in the Lower Manhattan

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neighborhood. I was frequently the only woman present during the last service. At some point, I assumed the unofficial role of greeting female ­visitors— issuing the salaam alaikum (peace be with you) when they came and went, pointing the way to the restrooms if they needed to perform ablutions, and answering any questions to the best of my ability. By the time of the rak‘at controversy, the role felt almost natural. Amid the grumblings over prayers on this particular day, Hussein—a Lebanese American from Shaykha Fariha’s Sufi tariqa who often served as the ­muezzin—appealed to American liberal mechanisms for solving the dispute and, in so doing, challenged the authority of the imams who served in Rauf ’s absence.1 “Let’s take a vote!” he shouted. “This is a democracy, right?” His call went unheeded and the commotion continued, slightly muted by traffic as worshippers filed out of the tiny prayer space. Most performed only two rak‘at that day, and some exchanged looks of concern over the usual melée of finding shoes and trading salaams at the back of the hall. The following week, Pedram—an Iranian American Shi‘i in his early thirties who regularly filled in as imam at this mainly Sunni mosque—read a message from Rauf to the assembled worshippers. On learning of the controversy from Pedram and another assistant, Fareena, Rauf had emailed to explain that most Sunni law schools permit combining the two prayers when worshippers need to travel. After the last jum‘ah that day, I joined Pedram, Fareena, and other dervishes for lunch at a trendy sandwich shop around the corner from the mosque. Over bowls of roasted tomato soup (paid for by Fareena or ­Pedram, both of whom regularly treated others to lunch and refused attempts at reimbursement), Fareena asked me if Rauf ’s letter on shari‘ah had been clear. I told her it was. “Good,” she replied, explaining that some of the immigrants needed to let go of their “cultural” biases about how to practice Islam.2 “We want to build an educated community on educated people,” she emphasized. Fareena then recommended to me some of the books she used for guidance in distinguishing cultural traditions from the essential, universal aspects of Islam that rightfully apply to living in the United States. Among the devotional and instructional materials Rauf recommended to his assistants were Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s writings. Drawing from Rauf and Nasr, Fareena explained to me that Sufi practice enables Muslims to appreciate the core of Islam—the aspects of the tradition that are universal, regardless of one’s racial, ethnic, or national culture—and, by helping Muslims pluralistically transcend cultural differences, to build unity within and across diverse



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communities. Yet she emphasized that understanding derived from Sufi practice did not alleviate the need for guidance from learned leaders—the role of a shaykh in disciplining and directing a community was still crucial. Without denying the value of liberal democracy, Fareena defended Rauf ’s authority from the challenge issued by Fariha’s dervish. She did so by appealing to a different American paradigm than Hussein had—one derived not from political liberalism but from the market liberalism that characterized her husband’s corporate job and that frequently appeared in Rauf ’s writings and talks. “Hussein is a janitor,” she analogized, expressing the appropriate relationship between learned shaykh and humble dervish, “and a janitor does not stand up to a CEO.” During the six years I spent attending jum‘ah at the Masjid al-Farah and getting to know members of the community, and during the three years I attended Rauf ’s dhikr meetings, I found that Muslims there, following Rauf ’s example, constantly interpreted Islamic traditions and strands of American liberalism (political, economic, and social) in light of each other.3 They did so while applying Rauf ’s teachings about Sufism and authentic Muslim living to their daily lives, even though not everyone agreed with all aspects of Rauf ’s vision of Americanness and definition of moderation. Those who joined his order and served as surrogates—filling in as imams and prayer leaders or delivering lectures while he was unavailable—often agreed with him more than others, and some chose Rauf as an imam and shaykh because he articulated ideas they already had about the United States and Islam. For example, one dervish related to me his Kashmiri grandfather’s axiom about American values: “If there’s any Islamic country in the world, it’s America!”4 Simultaneously, however, as we shall see, intertwining Islamic traditions with American liberalisms led some to be more vocally critical than Rauf of US domestic policy and social life, as well as aspects of other Muslims’ practices. In short, despite their similar interpretive strategies, Muslims at Masjid al-Farah—like Fareena and Hussein—came to very different conclusions about the proper contours of Muslim Americanness and moderation. In his khutbahs during these years, Rauf often enjoined worshippers to strive to overcome limited cultural traditions in order to adapt Islam to American society. Doing this, he informed listeners on a mid-spring afternoon a year after I began attending, requires a kind of “spiritual training” (a term he often used as a euphemism for Sufism) that begins with ritual observance but “evolves to higher levels through continued effort, wrestling with ourselves and God, in greater jihad.” He elaborated to say that such Sufi striving (jihad)

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awakens Muslims to the purpose of life: to know God. “If you are practicing your Islam without realizing this, then your Islam is cultural and not spiritual . . . If you are practicing your Islam because you are Arab or Pakistani or Senegalese, then your Islam is cultural.”5 As I discuss below, many of the Sufis I met followed Rauf ’s example of blaming other Muslims’ cultural mindsets for their misunderstandings of the proper relation between Islamic and American traditions, for acting immoderately in various ways, and for causing tensions among Muslims in the United States. Over the years, they also frequently reiterated his injunction to engage in the Islamic tradition of “greater jihad”6—a tradition that, in his telling, involves striving to foster an enlightened personal (as opposed to cultural) ­practice— in order to transcend the differences that divide them from each other and from members of other religions.7 While some echoed Rauf by interpreting this form of striving in terms of American economic liberalism, expressing the need to struggle for spiritual and material growth in market metaphors such as “investing” in the future, others had very different ideas about what authentic, moderate Islam should look like in America. These differences were evident in their disagreements about the shape community relations should take, as well as about how to balance the material success some of them had achieved in the liberal market with the financial and social needs of those dispossessed under US capitalism. Rather than acknowledge the political, economic, and racial aspects of these disagreements, the Muslims I encountered almost invariably described their differences as cultural ones. When such explanations for tensions or conflicts did not satisfy—such as when one person understood an issue to be simply cultural and another imbued it with more importance or saw it as political or economic—some Muslims appealed not just to the greater jihad of overcoming culture but also to other Sufi traditions that, they felt, helped them to manage disputes about practice and moderation. Making reference to adab—which some understand in terms of manners and etiquette and others view as akin to a guarantee of rights to equal treatment—allowed these community members to offer alternative visions of proper relations within the mosque and of authentic moderation in the United States. As we shall see, Sufis’ understandings of traditions such as adab sometimes varied as much as their understandings of culture did. This was perhaps unavoidable, even if their imam and shaykh had been more available to guide them personally. Not only did these Muslims interpret Rauf ’s teachings in light



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of their own daily circumstances, they (even converts) derived their understandings partly from the interpretative traditions common to their communities of origin. To place the understandings of Muslims at Masjid al-Farah in these larger interpretive contexts, I combine observations from my fieldwork with findings from Columbia University’s six-year “Muslims in New York” project, conducted from 1997–2003.8 Researchers involved in that study led focus-group interviews with Sufis (including some who identified as Rauf ’s dervishes) and other Muslim New Yorkers before the 9/11 attacks and did so again afterward to understand participants’ experiences of “identity, community, and civic and political engagement,” as well as their perceptions of the ways Islam and Muslims are represented in the United States.9 I attended to similar questions during my own research.10 Far from relying solely on interviews, however, I observed the ways in which Muslim New Yorkers, in their everyday interactions with each other, created senses of community and deliberated about how to live in the United States in what they understood to be an authentically Islamic manner. Comparing the perspectives of Rauf ’s dervishes with those of other local Muslims reveals the ways in which these Sufis engaged Islamic traditions and American liberalisms after 9/11 and, in the process, both expanded the possibilities for living authentically as Muslims and reinforced limits on what could be considered moderate.

Identifying Culture and Enacting Moderation On his return to the mosque a month after the rak‘at debate, Rauf reemphasized the need to practice Islam “beyond culture.” After ascending the steps of the stately, dark wood minbar (which functions somewhat like a pulpit) and offering an opening prayer, Rauf explained to the Friday congregants: “most of us, we grew up in Muslim families, we are Muslim because our parents are Muslims . . . you are Muslim because it is your culture. See, cultural religion is not good enough.”11 Because cultural religion is unexamined, Rauf argued, it blinds worshippers to the universal heart of Islam and allows unnecessary tensions over practice to arise. As he did frequently, Rauf encouraged worshippers at the mosque to strive for understandings that would allow them to overcome cultural conflicts and to model such liberal multicultural pluralism for the rest of the world. I heard Rauf deliver this injunction to worshipers at the Masjid al-Farah as early as a Ramadan service in 2004, during which he emphasized that the

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work of winnowing out problematic cultural biases and practices was a particularly American project, one Muslims in the United States are required to engage in because of the sheer diversity of Muslim communities in the country. “Brothers and Sisters,” he exhorted worshippers, “you have to anchor yourself on what is eternal and unchangeable in your religion. We, as American Muslims, know this. This is our din [tradition, or religion]. Deconstruct it . . . separate the cultural from the theological . . . because there are many practices that are cultural and not really eternal.”12 Rauf and the Sufis at his mosque were far from unique in juxtaposing appropriate individual striving, spiritual and material, with the immoderate practices of “cultural” Muslims—a category that often included those deemed to be too political. After 9/11, debates over cultural Islam and the nature of authentic jihad became a focal point for proving (or disputing) the moderation of Muslim Americans more broadly, and these distinctions between cultural and political Islam and what many see as the greater jihad of self-­ transformation frequently took on racial overtones. As I discuss below, many Muslims—trying to prove their moderation—associated extremism not simply with other Muslim individuals but with other cultural groups and races. Black American Muslims (Sufi and non-Sufi), for example, wavered between conflicting impulses in the years after 2001: to resolve their tensions with other Muslim communities in favor of general Muslim solidarity at a time of crisis or to create distance from the specter of Arab “political” Islam. One scholar of black American Islam captured (and echoed) these tensions over claims to moderate status by showing how they often involved racial dynamics. Writing about his findings in 2003, he argued that with much of the post-September 11 media coverage focusing on the immigrant communities, the social and political perspectives of African-American Muslims, who constitute roughly 30 percent of regular mosque participants, have largely been ignored. That is unfortunate because the ethnic identity of this group is shaped by its long history of contributions to the American experience. [Black] American Muslims are probably in the strongest position to refute the arguments of scholars who claim there is a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. “We [Muslims] are not at war with the American government,” said one of my interviewees, “but against temptation. It’s a jihad against yourself ” . . . “9/11 was a political jihad, not a religious jihad,” he said. “For that reason,



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­African-American Muslims do not connect to it. African-American Islam is about peace, justice, and prosperity.”13

According to this definition, proper Islam is not political—something, the interviewee implied, that is the province of Arabs or other racial groups—but personal, a “jihad against yourself.” Black American Muslims were not the only ones to claim that their communities were the most dedicated to engaging in the greater individual jihad of battling temptation and striving for peace, justice, and prosperity. Such racial overtones also echoed through Masjid al-Farah as Muslims from a wide variety of ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds interacted. As mentioned previously, the worshipers who assembled weekly at the masjid—and even the Sufis who were closest to Rauf and Fariha and served as community leaders—were extremely diverse. Some had been born into Muslim families. This was the case for two of Rauf ’s closest assistants, Faiz Khan, who cofounded ASMA, and Fareena, a graduate of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs who had married an American financier and worked for the United Nations before having children. Raised in Bangladesh, where women were not always welcome in mosques, Fareena had given up finding an imam she could relate to until she learned about Rauf in 1997 while visiting Sufi Books, a store owned by Shaykha Fariha that closed in 2006 as rents in the neighborhood skyrocketed.14 Fareena was one of the few dervishes who read Rauf ’s writings, making it unsurprising that she served as a leader within the community, filling in for Rauf in many ways when he travelled—­including delivering lectures to visiting groups and to audiences at various religious institutions and universities—while also dealing with many of the community’s organizational needs. Although once so close to her shaykh that she seldom had to refer to his writings for guidance, F ­ areena found herself reliant on these and other sources for reconciling Islamic and American traditions as Rauf spent greater stretches of time away and as conflicts arose within the community in his absence. While others in the mosque were not born into Muslim families, they sometimes still hailed from Muslim communities. Brother Malik, for example— a native New Yorker in his late fifties who had retired from the military and was winding down a second career as a Harlem schoolteacher in 2005—had been a Muslim for most of his adult life. Born to a Christian father and raised Protestant, but also the descendant of Cuban Muslim grandparents, Malik had

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friends in the Nation of Islam while in high school. An avid reader of books on comparative religion, he found his way to a variety of Sufi orders over the next forty years. Malik originally met Rauf at Shaykh Muzaffer’s Jerrahi dhikr service in the 1980s. Despite his extended tenure, Malik also maintained ties to other (mainly black American) Sufi orders.15 In addition to black Americans and Muslims from Arab and South Asian families, a small number of Euro-American converts regularly attended the mosque. Among them were Dean, an Italian American photographer, and Emily, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired young woman from North Carolina who often drew the attention of visiting reporters. Emily first attended the mosque at the request of her boyfriend, Manny—an Egyptian American whose brother had discovered the mosque the year before. Manny’s blonde, blue-eyed sisterin-law from Long Island (Leah) also greatly preferred the spatial arrangements within the mosque and Rauf ’s style of speaking to the more gender-segregated and (in her opinion) aggressive style of worship that she had encountered in other mosques around the city. More than once, I heard dervishes at the masjid comment on the overly “cultural” practices of worshippers from other ethnic or national backgrounds. This often happened when they perceived some practice to be a sign of excessive attachment to the outward minutiae of the tradition—such as when Senegalese street vendors who frequented the mosque left a sloshy layer of water on the floor of the upstairs bathroom after performing ablutions. (Admittedly vigorous in their washing habits, those who spent the day working on New York City streets found cleanliness before prayer to be no small achievement. Signs posted in English—but not French or Wolof—about the need to protect the floor failed to resolve the issue.) After a few years of attending the mosque, I also learned from occasional disapproving comments to notice the young Arab men who entered the building with their jeans rolled up above their ankles, a practice some deemed necessary because the Prophet Muhammad reportedly said that allowing a garment to hang below the ankles was a sign of conceit and possibly condemnable. The rhetorical style of some of the guest speakers also drew occasional disapproving comments. Frequently South Asian, and often visiting from the nearby Warren Street mosque, these speakers were much more exuberant when delivering their khutbahs than Rauf. Showing their cosmopolitan colors, even some of Rauf ’s and Fariha’s South Asian dervishes made critical remarks about the “hellfire and brimstone” style of these visiting imams. On



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one occasion, as a visiting imam enthusiastically held forth from the minbar, the proprietor of a neighboring restaurant and bar approached the mosque’s leaders to discuss the commotion. Fearing such speakers might alienate their neighbors and give other members of the community a false impression of the mosque, Rauf and his assistants enlisted men from Rauf ’s dhikr group to deliver Friday khutbahs instead. While these examples of varying practices might appear to be nothing more than innocuous cultural differences, they could be (and sometimes were) interpreted as signs of fanaticism—signs, in other words, that a particular person was not just an inappropriately cultural Muslim but also an inappropriately political one. This was not without consequences during a time of ubiquitous racial profiling and heavy government surveillance. It was by conducting themselves in contrast to such behaviors (and by vocally disapproving of them) that many of Rauf ’s and Fariha’s dervishes enacted their status as multicultural and pluralist Muslims and, in so doing, demonstrated their moderation to multiple audiences—defending themselves before non-Muslims while emulating moderation for the overly cultural Muslims in their midst. Those practices described as overly cultural and implicitly or explicitly ascribed to racial, ethnic, or national heritage occasionally overlapped with sectarian differences, despite the fact that a Shi‘i assistant imam was a central figure at the mosque. While new American converts voiced the least concern about differences between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims (and least awareness of them), other Sunnis were more circumspect about such things, although they often attempted to reconcile their suspicions about the validity of Shi‘i traditions with the pluralism Rauf encouraged. After a Friday evening dhikr ceremony in December 2006, for example—an evening when Rauf was in Malaysia and Pedram led the service—the conversation turned to the upcoming Islamic month of Muharram. Sipping her tea, legs crossed in front of her, ­Bakira, a Bosnian immigrant who had joined Rauf ’s Sufi group in the late 1990s, mentioned a special dessert her family often made during that time. “Noah’s Pudding,” as she called it, involves soaking together and then cooking a mixture of beans, grains, dried fruit, and sugar: all items Noah is thought to have combined from the stores left on his ark after the Great Flood. In Bosnia, they called the dessert “ashura.” Hearing this, Pedram laughed softly. “I’m pretty sure that’s a cultural innovation,” he responded. “As are the Shi‘i traditions,” Bakira shot back quickly, putting Pedram in his place. Pedram fell silent, not wanting to ­engage ­further

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on the topic. He offered no comment on the day of mourning, known as Ashura—the tenth of Muharram, which commemorates the martyrdom of a pivotal Shi‘i figure—to which Bakira was referring. Nor did he offer a defense of the practices sometimes associated with it, such as self-flagellation. Already slow to speak casually about Islam, perhaps partly the result of immigrating to the United States from Tehran at the age of eight during a time when the Iranian hostage crisis was the feature story of nightly newscasts, Pedram rarely mentioned his Shi‘i heritage.16 His references to Shi‘ism became even more infrequent as he began to serve as a regular imam on Fridays and as he increasingly led the prayers at dhikr and offered sohbets (the postdhikr exhortations or addresses generally delivered by a shaykh) to Rauf ’s dervishes. While Rauf considered Shi‘i traditions to be among the many paths available for accessing the Divine, other Sunni Muslims in the community saw Shi‘i practices, particularly those of Iranians long demonized by American media outlets and politicians, as excessively cultural and even excessively political. Voicing skepticism of these traditions not only served to underline their Sunni orthodoxy—which some may have felt was in question due to their Sufi ­practices—but also demonstrated, by contrast to ostensibly fanatical Iranians and other racialized groups, their status as moderate Muslim Americans. Unbeknownst to most dervishes and mosque attendees, Rauf frequently borrowed form the teachings of a Shi‘i thinker, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for his Friday khutbahs. Moreover, it was partly from Nasr—as well as from his father, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf—that Rauf had learned to combine Islamic traditions with American liberalisms. While very few of the Sufis I interviewed had read Rauf ’s highly publicized 2004 book, even fewer, if any, knew that Abdul-Rauf, Nasr, and Michael Novak had worked together to illustrate the commonality between Islamic teachings and American market liberalism in the 1980s. Those who belonged to one of the orders associated with the mosque often assumed that Rauf simply elaborated on Shaykh Muzaffer’s teachings when illustrating his understandings of the Qur’an and when urging Muslims to overcome cultural differences. In contrast, Rauf ’s closest assistants often discussed Nasr’s writings and used them as resources for teaching. It was from these resources that they and Rauf derived the understanding they tried to impart to other community members: that most varieties of Islam and, more than that, most varieties of religion, are cultural variations on a universal theme. Several Sufis echoed ­aspects of



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these arguments, even without awareness of their origins, as discussed below. Doing so could not always dispel the tensions that arose from so-called cultural differences, however.

Religious Commonalities and Community Tensions On a dreary January day in 2006, I visited Battery Park City, where Fareena had just moved with her husband, toddler, and new baby. Making my way from the subway to her building meant taking a pedestrian footbridge that wound around the gaping cavern in Lower Manhattan left by the missing Twin ­Towers, then crossing over the West Side Highway into a miniature city of tree-lined streets. The rows of bare trunks, bleak with winter, were multiplied in the gleaming windows of office and residential skyscrapers and interrupted only by uniformed doormen. Fareena welcomed me into her apartment with characteristic graciousness, apologizing for the boxes and offering a cup of tea. The new place didn’t have a neighborhood feel, she lamented, but at least it was closer to the mosque and to her husband’s job in the Financial District than their other apartment had been. Fareena and I spent some time catching up while her two-year-old played peek-a-boo from the kitchen doorway. Our conversation eventually turned to matters of faith and practice, as it often did, and Fareena informed me that Rauf had suggested she read a biennial Traditionalist-Perennialist journal to which Nasr and his students and colleagues frequently contribute. In her experience, the articles in Sacred Web17 provided a more expansive understanding of religion than that promoted by nominal religious authorities, such as those in Saudi Arabia, whom she considered to be self-appointed gatekeepers of orthodoxy. Feeling particular contempt for Saudi officials on that day, given the news of many recent deaths in Mecca during the annual pilgrimage, Fareena asked rhetorically, “with all of the money that comes in from the hajj, can’t they build a better infrastructure to protect people from accidents?” In contrast to her disdain for Saudi leaders, Fareena considered Nasr’s perspective so important that she had already unpacked and placed the Sacred Web journals on the bookshelves in her otherwise sparsely furnished living room and used them almost exclusively when teaching.18 Later that year, I sat with Pedram at Franklin Station, Rauf ’s favorite FrenchMalaysian restaurant, and talked about Nasr as we waited for the kitchen to finish Rauf ’s takeaway order. As usual, Pedram—who had yet to begin delivering

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khutbahs then—was fixed on his laptop. Assuming that fetching food was one of his paid duties, I asked him how long he had been working for Rauf. Pedram responded with a slight smile and the usual repose that set him apart from other young men in the group. “I don’t work for Imam Feisal. I’m a trader,” he replied softly.19 I realized then that what he frequently inspected on his computer over lunch was the traffic of financial transactions taking place before the stock markets closed for the weekend. “Ohhhh, sorry,” I said, embarrassed that I had assumed the service he offered to his shaykh was work done for a weekly paycheck. As we talked further, Pedram informed me of how close his Iranian family was to Rauf and described how he had taken college classes with William Chittick, one of Nasr’s students and frequent collaborators, several years prior. It was during that time that Pedram became interested in Sufism. I then asked Pedram what he thought of Rauf ’s reliance on Nasr. “He doesn’t really like Nasr’s antimodernism,” Pedram informed me. Indeed, Rauf ’s khutbahs, like his writings, included frequent references to modern conveniences, modern sciences, and market economics. The week just prior, in fact, in front of a State Department delegation of visiting scholars from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, Rauf had exhorted Friday worshipers to strive to build up their “net worth.” Islam was not just about ritual, he emphasized, but about striving to “increas[e] one’s assets and decreas[e] one’s liabilities” spiritually.20 Pedram, in comparison, who became an assistant imam after Faiz Khan left the community in 2006, never used market metaphors in his khutbahs. Instead, he usually illustrated the Qur’an with passages from Rumi. Although Rauf is not as antimodern as Nasr, Pedram informed me, he’s also “not a modernist like [Fazlur Rahman] at Chicago,” who only regarded parts of the Qur’an as authoritative for providing instruction about contemporary issues. Rauf “searches for a middle ground,” Pedram said. What really interested Rauf was not Nasr’s Traditionalism but his Perennialist Sufism—the idea that one truth has been perennially revealed over time and, due to changing cultural and historical circumstances, has given rise to a variety of religious traditions. Unlike Pedram, who diligently followed Chittick’s writings on Ibn ‘Arabi (an eleventh-century Sufi sage whom many Perennialists consider to be an early proponent of Perennialism) and often attended lectures on Iranian traditions at Columbia, most of Rauf ’s dervishes were less interested in philosophy than in dhikr, poetry, and art (the traditions Fareena often discussed with groups visiting the mosque). Or, they found value in practicing Islam together as part



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of a community. In fact, those without family obligations sometimes spent long hours together over meals, coffee, or tea after jum‘ah or dhikr, discussing their spiritual paths. They connected their “inner” experiences to movies, music, work, or other parts of their lives, especially their dreams (which Rauf used to interpret for them, sometimes treating them as evidence of divine urgings, and other times as workings-out of the psyche), without having read a thing. Still, it was evident in their conversations that aspects of Nasr’s Perennialism— particularly the distinction between the inner spiritual essence common to all religions and the outer cultural forms that essence assumes—permeated their understandings. Like Nasr, Rauf describes Sufism as the means of inculcating the shari‘ah in one’s inner self.21 Rauf and his assistant imams frequently distinguished in khutbahs between the zahir and the batin (terms often associated with Shi‘i, even Isma‘ili, esoteric traditions), which Rauf described as referring to the “outer” shari‘ah and rituals and the “inner” spirit of Sufi practice, respectively.22 Appreciating the distinctions between the two aspects of Islam, he argued, allows Muslims of different backgrounds to identify what is universal in their religion and to recognize each other as common pilgrims on the path toward union with the Divine. In the introduction to a popular 2006 book, The Universal Spirit of Islam, Rauf elaborated on this view. God the almighty Creator has repeatedly revealed His religion, essential and unique in its universal principles, through many prophet-messengers who have lived in different climes, languages, and cultures. Eternal and universal divine Truth has therefore respected locality by expressing itself in the language and culture of each prophet. The divine Word criticizes human beings for confusing locality with universality, thus effectively splitting God’s one religion into many divisions. Our duty as religious people in the twenty-first century is to recognize the points of unity among different revelations.23

Citing multiple verses from the Qur’an to buttress this perspective but also tracing it to Frithjof Schuon, Nasr’s Perennialist mentor, Rauf insisted that differences among Muslims were similar to differences between Muslims and members of other religions: all were variations on universal truth.24 For Rauf, this perspective makes it possible to disregard racial, cultural, sectarian, and even religious differences among those who ultimately subscribe to the same

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essential truths and ethics. Imparting this view to others, he argued for dispensing with some cultural traditions (particularly those that might be regarded as too political) and for adopting more “American” ones. And in making such arguments, Rauf enacted moderation for multiple audiences. Several Sufis I encountered at Rauf ’s mosque similarly emphasized commonalities with members of other religions, and most agreed that the Qur’an mandates pluralism. If they quoted any verse to substantiate this, it was usually Qur’an 49:13, a passage about the divine design behind human differences that Rauf also invoked in a 2005 article he wrote on Muslim multiculturalism. “O humankind,” he translated it, “we certainly created you from one male and one female, and fashioned you into tribes and nations so that you might get to know/celebrate each other.”25 While Rauf ’s emphasis on multiculturalism and religious commonality appealed to many worshippers at Masjid al-Farah, though, it also sometimes proved to be of limited utility. Among the Muslims who found Rauf ’s Perennialist teachings on religious commonality compelling were converts whose family members belonged to other traditions. As Abdul-Raheem, a black American former corrections officer, born to a Jehovah’s Witness mother in an otherwise Baptist family, confessed, he sometimes still attended church to celebrate the milestones of family members and friends and did not see the need for religious exclusivity. “I always thought I belonged to all of it,” he told me.26 Despite the various forms of practice among the religions, “there is just one” ultimate truth. He then admitted that he had not always been so open. After he began practicing Sufism twenty years earlier, he started to “moderate” how he dressed—dropping the robes and turbans he had once believed were necessary signs of “orthodox” Islam and that set him apart from other members of his multireligious family. Rauf ’s Perennialism also appealed to many affluent Muslim immigrants— often younger transnational ones, educated in English-speaking private schools in their home countries (to which they frequently returned), who were somewhat dazzled by the religious and cultural diversity of the United States. One Kashmiri importer, for example, acknowledged that he did not have Buddhist or Hindu friends while growing up. After moving to the United States for college, though, that changed. “I met a lot of new friends, and they’re really close and dear to me, really close and dear . . . you know, in every tradition there’s truth to be found.”27 Nevertheless, many of the Muslims I spoke with still struggled with the differences within their Muslim community, despite the fact that they valued



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Rauf ’s teachings about unity, reiterated the distinction he and his assistant imams made between the inner spirit and outer cultural or ritual aspects of Islam, and tried to demonstrate respect for people who practiced other traditions—something they had regular opportunities to do if they participated in ASMA’s interreligious events or in Rauf ’s dhikrs, which a few Jews and Christians also attended. This struggle was due, at least in part, to the pressures Muslims in New York faced after 9/11, ones that made it difficult to dismiss differences as simply cultural variations. The pressures on Muslim Americans after 9/11, it cannot be overstated, include intense scrutiny and the demand to demonstrate their moderation by creating distance from anyone whose overly cultural practice could be construed as fanatical or political. Importantly, less obvious pressures also contributed to more mundane and more frequent disagreements between Muslims about the importance of cultural practices. The factors responsible for these largely unarticulated disputes were not just race, ethnicity, and nation of origin (though they often correlated with such things). Rather, the important factors also included socio-economic status, availability of resources, and histories of marginalization—in other words, political and economic issues that went unacknowledged when Muslim Americans, taking pains not to appear extremist, framed problems in terms of culture instead of politics.28 Framing problems in terms of culture is not a new phenomenon.29 Muslims in the United States who have employed this rhetorical strategy have long sought to resolve a host of interrelated issues. In addition to questions of authority and authentic practice, these issues include the multicultural respect various groups feel they deserve but are denied, as well as the mutual social and economic responsibility that many feel should characterize Muslim communities but does not.30 These sometimes-unarticulated concerns about respect and ­responsibility—particularly with regard to economic resources— were evident at Masjid al-Farah in the ways community members interacted with each other and in their notions of moderation, which they often described through contrasts to extremism. As I discuss below, they were also evident in various Muslims’ disagreements about the importance of cultural traditions that did not constitute required parts of Islamic faith and practice. While Rauf encouraged worshipers to practice a culture-free Islam—and, more specifically, to shed traditions that do not fit with America’s democratic, capitalist culture—some Muslims were not so ready to relinquish their particular practices or to speak as approvingly of what they considered to be an overly mate-

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rialist culture and a predatory economic system. In appealing to Sufi traditions other than the “greater jihad,” these Muslims both demanded the respect they felt they were owed and offered a different vision of how to live authentically in the United States.

The Complexities of Culture and Community Relations In exhorting Muslims to strive to understand the inner heart of Islam not bound by culture, Rauf often suggested that cultural traditions were rather unimportant. Speaking at the mosque one day, for example, he told the assembled worshippers, It is like wearing a suit instead of wearing a bubu or wearing a thaub. It’s a cultural thing. When I go to Saudi Arabia, I wear a thaub. But when I’m in New York for a big meeting, I wear a suit. It’s something which is like something I wear. I can take it off. It has no real . . . it’s not a batin-y thing, it’s an exterior thing. So is your Islam an exterior thing or is it a batin-y thing?

Cultural traditions are optional aspects of life, Rauf implied, correcting himself when he began to describe culture as “not real.” When observed too strongly, they obscure the truth of Islam and create obstacles to living authentically. While several dervishes echoed Rauf ’s argument—almost invariably when they believed someone else’s actions or speech reflected a superficial understanding of Islam—they often used “culture” as a metonym to stand in for other things, ones that were important to them in a variety of complicated ways. Most of those I interviewed at one point or another discussed their hope to someday witness the kind of unity among Muslims that transcends particular cultural differences. Unlike Rauf, however, who urged listeners to shed immigrant cultural traditions so as to adopt dominant “American” ones, some Muslims made different kinds of distinctions between inner Islamic truths and outer cultural forms. For them, separating truth from culture meant recognizing that all cultures—even aspects of Arab culture often seen as synonymous with Islamic orthodoxy and aspects of American culture that Rauf touted as ideal—are equally limited. In a very multicultural manner, it also meant recognizing that all cultures could lead worshipers to divine truth. Consequently, when told that their own traditions were inauthentic, these Muslims (often black Americans and Latinos who were socially and economically marginalized) repeated back to their critics (often Arabs and South Asians) the impera-



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tive to separate truth from culture. Separating truth from culture allowed them to challenge their challengers—to create a theoretically neutral space from which they could demand respect for and protection of their own cultural traditions, as well as protection of the communities, social supports, and economic resources connected to them. Brother Malik frequently gave evidence of this alternate perspective in khutbahs he delivered at the mosque, and he was not unique in doing so. After worshippers trickled into the masjid one afternoon in September of 2005, for example, Brother Malik emphasized what he understood to be universal desires, including a “yearning for peace.” As the ceiling fans whirred overhead in an almost futile effort to dispel the late summer heat, he turned to what he saw as Islamic mandates for mutual respect among Muslims. “The Prophet, praise be upon him, would have us, you know, treat others as we want to be treated . . . I’m Arabic challenged, you know, but when we meet every week, I try to speak from my heart to your heart . . . to be kind, charitable, understanding . . .” Not content to leave worshippers with only a general injunction to foster unity, Brother Malik underlined the stakes of doing so. The larger Muslim community could survive, in his opinion, only if those within it acted in solidarity. For Brother Malik, who came of age in Harlem during the height of the Nation of Islam, such solidarity traditionally included patronage of black-owned businesses that provided an economic infrastructure in otherwise neglected and blighted inner cities. “I encourage you to give our brothers our business,” he exhorted the diverse attendees. “[We need] the local community, so buy your halal meat, you know, from your brothers . . . and be charitable with the upkeep of the mosque . . . ”31 Brother Malik represented a less affluent sector of the Sufi population than Rauf. Like many of Rauf ’s dervishes, he had traveled (often with the military) in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and spoke about the importance of understanding the world’s various religious traditions—something that not only helped to foster peace, in his opinion, but that helped him see the larger meaning of life beyond the trials of daily circumstances. While as cosmopolitan as other mosque attendees and as dedicated to lifelong learning, however, his daily life was constrained by a lack of means. Like some of the other dervishes who attended dhikr, Malik read works on self-help philosophy and comparative religions—but he did so from his sometimes-unheated Harlem apartment (the landlord often cut off utilities in attempts to get tenants to move so the rent-controlled apartments could then be listed at market rates). The cultural

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traditions he shared with other members of his Harlem neighborhood were not just inherited beliefs or particular items of clothing but strategies and resources for managing these conditions. They were ways of forging and maintaining community ties that were essential for surviving. Black American Muslims involved with the Columbia University study took similar positions. Some lamented the decline of community c­ ohesiveness—and of related social services—that seemed to coincide both with the decline in prominence of the Nation of Islam (and its network of businesses, schools, and houses of worship) and with the increase in Arab and South Asian Muslim immigration to the area.32 They blamed this loss of cohesion not only on racism that, they maintained, was a problem among Muslims in America—with many immigrants, in their view, adopting white American stereotypes about black criminality—but also on economic disparities that, they argued, also exacerbated intra-Muslim tensions.33 As a black American police officer in one focus group interview bluntly put it, the dominant “American culture is a racist culture [and] a class culture.” Already strained by the racism often lurking behind comments about cultural difference, relations between Muslim communities are further stressed by “class-oriented masjids,” he argued, particularly affluent ones in poor neighborhoods where local (often black and Latino) children are not accepted into the mosque’s schools.34 “We are trying to deal with the Islamic community and we have to recognize that fact . . . [W]e have social issues, class issues, racial issues, [and] we can not always put our head in the sand.”35 The more affluent Muslims who gathered at Masjid al-Farah on Fridays included importers, financial analysts and traders, and brokers of commercial real estate. While their incomes likely varied as much as their nationalities, most did not need the economic supports provided within local communities—be it childcare offered in shifts by alternating parents and neighbors; meal sharing; or frequently circulating gifts of groceries—and tended not to see cultural solidarity as a source of material security. Further, the more economically stable Euro-American converts in the group were frequently unaware that tensions over resources even existed between Muslim communities in the United States and (like many affluent Muslims) tended to view calls to address disparity as immoderate and as the cause of political controversies.36 After jum‘ah one rainy spring day in 2007, these generally submerged differences over culture, economic disparity, and mutual responsibility came to the surface. Several mosque attendees (mostly Rauf ’s dervishes) traversed the flooded streets to enjoy a collective meal at Franklin Station. As diners packed



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around tables at the front of the restaurant, the discussion turned to a recent New York Times article that discussed economic inequalities between black and immigrant Muslim Americans.37 One Muslim, an importer who made frequent trips back to his native Calcutta and had helped finance construction of the Islamic Center of Long Island mentioned in the piece, said he had not read the article because it seemed too negative. “What divisions?” Masheer asked rhetorically. “There are no divisions.” He then explained that families at the Long Island Islamic center were “adopting” black American Muslims so as to assist them and develop ties between the groups. The two black American Muslims seated at the table for lunch remained silent during the discussion, neither offering nor being asked for their opinions. The conversation moved to the different voting patterns mentioned in the article and to the black American Muslims who felt betrayed in 2000 when Arab and South Asian organizations supported the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, who had promised to stop racially profiling Arabs. Black American Muslims, in contrast, tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Listening to a review of the article’s points, Masheer interjected, “Irish Catholics don’t all vote the same way . . . so why focus on Muslims?”38 Later that afternoon, as two of Rauf ’s Euro-American dervishes met over coffee in the West Village, the subject came up again. Dean had not read the article, and Emily—who had only glanced at it—summarized it as a story about an imam “from the Bronx or Brooklyn who went out to Long Island” to ask for money. That imam was Talib Abdur Rashid of the Mosque of Islamic Brother­ hood in Harlem, who had traveled to Long Island during Ramadan to raise money for the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA, a community service and antirecidivism organization he and other black American Muslim leaders founded in 1999).39 Although Emily and Dean participated in many projects with Rauf and other New York City religious leaders, neither had heard of Imam Talib’s decades of interreligious and social service work in Manhattan or knew of his organization. “Why can’t we just all see each other as believers?” Emily asked (echoing Masheer). She went on to say that she thought the article’s discussion of economic issues was creating tensions that had not previously existed.40 Emily and Masheer both believed that it was important to help those who were, in their opinions, truly struggling financially, and they cited such action as proof of authentic Muslim Americanness. Nevertheless, unlike Faroque Khan, the Long Island Muslim leader who had invited Imam Talib to fundraise at the Islamic Center after reading books about systemic racism in the United

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States, Masheer and others resisted discussions of systemic economic marginalization. This resistance exposed the boundaries of moderation for them. For Masheer, “adopting” struggling families was an important way to enact the “balance” (a word many used instead of “moderation”) of individual economic success and community care that should mark a devout Muslim’s life; “political” projects of reducing economic marginalization were not. Emily somewhat illuminated the logic underlying this distinction by later citing “ghetto” culture as the cause of some Americans’ economic distress, implying that these Americans had not cultivated the personal habits and practices necessary to succeed in the American work force. Such Muslims—mired in a culture of immoderate dependency rather than of personal striving, many believed—were not justified in making claims on the resources of others. In addition to economic disparities, histories of political and social marginalization and repression could influence how attached various Muslim Americans felt to their cultures, to their communities of origin, and to the traditions practiced within them. One black American in the 2003 Columbia group ­argued that black American Muslim traditions were as authentically Islamic as those of Arab Muslims. This was not despite the fact that their histories and cultures differed, it was because they differed and because of the repression black Americans had endured, particularly under slavery. Citing W. D. Mohammed, she argued that black Americans’ experiences had given them a unique ability to appreciate the inner heart and essence of Islam and also made black American Muslims uniquely poised to heal America’s broken democracy. Only black Americans, she believed, could guide the country back to its original spiritual principles and, in serving as such leaders, undo the hypocrisy of the founders who had argued for liberty while holding slaves. I think God has really given us this mandate to be physicians . . . slavery did something to our spirits, created a unique respect for spirituality . . . [N]ot religion, but that unique inner spiritual life that we have, that can go into the Koran and say, “Oh, wait a minute. My soul is telling me that this is what this is saying.” . . . [T]hrough your ancestors you have learned how to connect with the Creator on a deep level. Because that’s all we had [during slavery] . . . And also our culture. We have something to offer in examining how do you reconcile this democracy with the hypocrisy. Our ancestors have forged the way to correct that . . . from Frederick Douglass who said no, we’re not going to throw away America. He could have said let’s leave. He had that option.



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This Muslim woman and members of her community distinguished between outward cultural traditions and the inner essence of Islam not to dismiss the importance of culture but to assert the importance of their own cultural traditions in the face of marginalization from those who associate Islam with Arabs and the United States with white privilege. They were not alone in seeing Islam as a resource for strengthening marginalized communities. For “African American and Latino Muslims,” another interviewee described, Islam “helped to establish ourselves as an entity to be respected . . . something extremely important for us since we were politically dominated as a people [when I converted]. I’m speaking now specifically of African Americans and Puerto Ricans . . . Politically we saw Islam as a force to be reckoned with. We saw Islam as a liberating element in our lives. . . .”41 For this man—and, if his description is accurate, for many other marginalized Muslim New Yorkers—Islam provided a sense of pride in community and even a foundation for multicultural political alliances, something that he felt was challenged by the biases of other Muslims and their assertions that his practices were not authentic. In his opinion, the solution to reconciling these competing experiences—liberating, on the one hand, and stifling, on the other—could be found in Sufism. Rather than appealing to the “greater jihad” of transcending culture, however, this marginalized Muslim mentioned other Sufi traditions. Many times we [converts] would be met with opposition: “oh, you’re not really Muslim if you can’t speak Arabic.” This is one of the first obstacles that we had to overcome. [We were told,] “You really can’t learn this religion unless you go to Mecca to study, or to Al-Azhar.” So we began to look beyond the limitations that were being imposed on us from people that were trying to limit and stifle our growth. Many of us were attracted to the concept of tasawwuf [Sufism] because tasawwuf personalizes the spiritual experience for the person that is new. Newcomers have rights over the people that have been in the deen a longer time. Tasawwuf has the adab, the ‘urf and akhlaq to put that up front.42

Far from seeing the need to practice culture-free Islam, this Muslim described Islam as strengthening the cultural pride and community cohesion of marginalized groups and as aiding their efforts to achieve political and economic justice in America. When Muslims outside of his community threatened that pride or political project by claiming that his practices, traditions, or understandings were overly cultural—or, in this case, insufficiently cultural in

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that they were insufficiently Arab—this Muslim New Yorker appealed to adab, among other things, to assert his rights. The black American police officer who commented on class relations within American mosques echoed his perspective. “Tasawwuf,” he argued, is what one needs to “make you strong” with “those brothers” (of Arab origin) and to start to build relations with them.43 When disagreements arose at Masjid al-Farah over matters of authentic practice, less affluent and more frequently marginalized Sufis—particularly those who had converted to Islam—also appealed to the mandates of adab, which they understood to be a tradition that ensured not just proper etiquette between Muslims (a common understanding of the term), but also something larger: “rights” of respect very much like those implicit in American liberal multiculturalism, and even an ethic of community-mindedness that might lead to addressing economic problems. In other words, Sufi traditions of adab provided Muslims with an authoritative argument for overcoming a variety of issues—ones generally described as “cultural,” but which often had to do with histories of collective domination or of material deprivation. Invoking adab and the duties of service often associated with it was one way marginalized Muslims could attempt to moderate what they saw as the ­excesses—overly cultural perspectives and even overly materialistic attitudes— of their frequently more affluent critics. As such, it was also a way for them to offer their own visions of authentic Muslim living in America. While those raised in Muslim-majority countries did not usually understand adab in terms of rights, respect, and service, these interpretations are not without precedent, as I describe below. My goal in discussing different interpretations of adab is not to assert the validity of any one particular understanding. Rather, it is to show some of the ways that economic and political factors—in addition to racial and ethnic differences but not reducible to them—influence how people and groups understand, practice, and live Islamic traditions in the United States.

Adab as Rights, Respect, and Economic Moderation Adab practices have been central to Islamic traditions for at least a thousand years. Nevertheless, understandings of adab have always depended on context.44 Historically, writers have composed manuals outlining adab practices for varying purposes: to address the norms of courtly behavior, to outline the contours of certain vocational and social roles, to illuminate the appropriate conduct of Muslims in pluralistic environments (often, perhaps especially, during



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times of political and social upheaval), and to detail proper Sufi comportment in social situations (sometimes even specifying the moment at which diners were permitted to use napkins).45 In view of these many uses, it is not surprising that adab is sometimes translated as “etiquette.” Significantly, from South Asia to Egypt, adab has also been translated more robustly as “ethics.”46 Still, neither the term “etiquette” nor “ethics” captures the real weight and import these traditions can have. Because adab practices are part of a system of conduct in which the individual’s relationship to the divine is inseparable from the individual’s relationships with other persons (with proper action towards others contributing to the self-transformation necessary for drawing closer to God47), some scholars have tried to convey the more transformative, interpersonal character of adab by translating the famous ninth-century phrase at-tasawwuf kulluhu adab as “Sufism is all practical ethics.”48 So central is the practice of adab to Shaykha Fariha’s Sufi order, the Nur Ashki Jerrahis, that members of that tariqa dedicated a portion of their website to explaining it. Adab, commonly translated as moral character and refined behavior, is the state of perfect awareness, love, and gracious sensitivity which is innate to our soul. The highest level of adab is the knowledge that we have no independent existence apart from the One Reality. Perfect adab is constant awareness of Allah. From this awareness flows all beautiful behavior. On our path as dervishes we learn to govern the other aspects of our humanity with the light of adab so that we become complete human beings.49

In this excerpt, the Nur Ashki Jerrahis translate adab in terms of interpersonal ethics rather than etiquette or manners. “The adab we bear toward others is our adab toward Allah,” the webpage continues, emphasizing the interconnection between a dervish’s actions toward other people and her relationship with God. As to the practical expressions of such ethics, the perspective of the Nur Ashkis is quite close to that of participants in the Columbia University interviews. “Mature adab never hardens into fixed rules or the correction of others,” the Nur Ashki website states. Although not explicitly associating adab with the rights of marginalized populations to receive respect, the Nur Ashki tariqa—a Sufi order led by a woman and comprised mainly of converts to Islam—also interprets proper adab in part as an ethic of humility toward those whose practices may differ from what others consider orthodox.

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Contrary to what one might expect from the Nur Ashki website—a website used to assert the authenticity of Fariha’s order and implicitly defend the legitimacy of female leadership50—I did not often, if ever, hear Shaykha Fariha or her dervishes invoke adab in interactions with others during my fieldwork. The person who spoke most frequently about adab was Brother Malik. In contrast to members of Fariha’s order, who felt secure and even empowered in the building their tariqa owned, Brother Malik had reason to feel marginalized. He was the only black leader at Masjid al-Farah, and one who lived a life far less privileged than others did. During a khutbah in the spring of 2007, for example, Brother Malik stressed the responsibilities, or “duties,” of Sufi practice. “Adab,” Brother Malik emphasized, requires Muslims to engage in actions that demonstrate their humility and their respect for others. These actions included being “truthful in your speech,” “humble,” and “avoid[ing] causing difficulties to others while bearing the difficulties caused by them.”51 Yet Brother Malik did not simply echo the ethic of respect and humility mentioned by other Sufis (particularly converts) in his discussion of adab. For him, a central component of pious living and of Sufi adab is being “generous with your property,” or, as he sometimes put it, “charity.” Such charitable adab served to demonstrate care for other Muslims at the same time that they moderated one’s own affluence and privilege, thereby demonstrating not only piety, but a kind of “balance”—a life dedicated to spiritual growth and social improvement, not just to material acquisition—that could serve as an example to those with excessively cultural or political practices. Several months before that khutbah, as US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretched through yet another year, Brother Malik had explained the responsibility of American Muslims to serve as examples to inappropriately cultural and political Muslims elsewhere and expanded on the ways charitable adab could demonstrate proper balance. Addressing affluent immigrants with “relatives overseas” where Muslims detonated “suicide bombs” (thus associating extremism with Muslims born in conflict areas), Brother Malik informed them that Muslims here in America are in a position to have a great influence on the development in the Muslim world . . . That’s something you need to consider. So while you’re making all that money and, you know, sending your children to the best schools and, you know, you’re eating all that good halal meat and all that stuff . . . also think of charity in terms of helping your brothers and sisters overseas to straighten themselves out . . . not just materially, we should show them



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that we’re living well spiritually . . . that there’s a balance in our lives, that while we’re making money with one hand, we’re also keeping connection to Allah with the other hand. 52

Importantly, men were not alone in employing the language of adab to criticize what they viewed as immoderate affluence or privilege. As we have seen, female converts occasionally also invoked adab to subtly demand respect in an Islamically sanctioned way, such as on the website for Fariha’s tariqa. More frequently, they employed the concept as a way of correcting immoderate or overly privileged behavior. “Where is your adab?!” Charley, a veiled Euro-American convert and adjunct professor of African studies, exclaimed in frustration one afternoon after watching Emily interact with an elderly West African man. In Charley’s opinion, Emily had treated the man disrespectfully by instructing him to stop blocking the mosque’s only exit after Friday prayers while asking for alms (sadaqa). As Euro-American female converts, both Charley—who had married a black American Muslim and knew some of the difficulties of black American life—and Emily are particularly subject to communal scrutiny over privilege and proper practice in many ways. This scrutiny comes not just from men, something both Emily and Charley experienced on a number of occasions,53 but also from women seeking to demonstrate their authority—including black American Muslim women who sometimes experience similar scrutiny from Muslims of Arab and South Asian descent. Even while some Muslims saw Charley and Emily as overly privileged, however, both women invoked adab to criticize what they saw as others’ insufficient economic moderation. Notably, they did so to confront other white female converts, not (at least, not in my observations) to criticize other Muslim-born men and women. Emily, a resident of the chic SoHo neighborhood just north of Masjid ­al-Farah, was more financially secure than some Muslims at the mosque when I met her, but she had not always been so fortunate. During her first few years in New York, she worked as a waitress and lived off tips. Her life became more comfortable once she married a real estate broker, after which she gave up the waitressing job that required her to serve alcohol and went back to college. Still, the contrasts between her modest North Carolina childhood and the opulent lives of many who worked in the Financial District often caught her attention. While supportive of Rauf ’s argument that Muslim Americans needed to strive for wealth in this world and the next, she sometimes indicated that she believed Sufi striving should have more limits. For example, during a 2007 khutbah in

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which Rauf had again encouraged those at jum‘ah to put their full energies into bettering their spiritual and material conditions, she could not hide her disapproval. On that particular Friday, Rauf cautioned his listeners about pursuing excessive wealth and illustrated his point by telling them that he once believed he needed to have his own boat. Upon further reflection, though, he realized that he did not need more than two hundred thousand dollars (presumably a year) to be content in his worldly existence. When I glanced at Emily during this portion of the khutbah, I found her eyebrows to be higher on her forehead than usual in an unmitigated expression of surprise. After jum‘ah she confessed to having been stunned by the figure. Emily never directly challenged her imam’s economic teachings or financial practices in those years, though she did sometimes suggest that there needed to be greater transparency about dervishes’ donations to ASMA—particularly if dervishes were to allow Rauf and Khan to debit their checking accounts directly for contributions to what was then called the Cordoba Center project, as had been suggested as early as 2007.54 She did make reference to adab in order to check the privilege of Fariha and her dervishes, however, once Fariha’s order—conscious of the rising cost of building repairs—closed the restrooms and began restricting access to the mosque outside of prayer times. After yet another Friday morning of chasing construction workers in their work boots off of the prayer carpets—no small feat, in that the leaks from the waterlogged restrooms were at the opposite end of the prayer hall from the entrance— a female leader of Fariha’s order remarked that the masjid was really meant for Fariha’s Sufi meetings but “we give it to [Rauf ’s group] for jum‘ah.” Emily overheard the remark and gave voice to the tensions building between the two communities at that time. “It’s a mosque . . . how do you own a mosque?” she questioned aloud, and went on criticize the woman’s failure of adab.55 Emily’s recourse to adab in this situation, combined with the other examples discussed above, demonstrates how the tradition serves (among other things) as an Islamically sanctioned way for members of the community who feel marginalized to demand respect, to assert claims to resources, and to question what they see as immoderate privilege. As noted previously, it provides a way for some Muslims to navigate the so-called cultural tensions produced by racial differences and socio-economic disparities. By using the tradition in this way, many of these Muslims assert understandings of moderation that borrow from and replicate some aspects of American political and economic liberalism while simultaneously criticizing other aspects that, in their experiences, fail to



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meet Islamic standards for ethical behavior. Additionally, as use of the term by Emily and Charley indicates, making reference to adab allows women—­ particularly Euro-American converts who feel scrutinized by other Muslims but who decline to rebut such criticism directly—to assert their own authority and understandings of what is moderate, what is ethical, and what is (for better or worse) American. In Chapter 6, I delve more fully into the gender dynamics I observed during my six years of fieldwork at the mosque and discuss how Muslims there dealt with what many non-Muslims regard as the ultimate index of moderation: the status of women. First, though, having identified some of the ways Muslims in New York interpreted Islamic and American traditions in light of each other, I conclude this chapter by discussing the limits placed on moderation when Muslim Americans—in part wary of appearing extremist—frame problems in cultural terms instead of political or economic ones.

Conclusion: Sufi Striving and the Limits of Moderation Most Muslims at Masjid al-Farah did not argue for the need to demonstrate moderation as often as Rauf did. More frequently, as noted above, they attempted to demonstrate their own lack of extremism through contrasts to others. These Sufis juxtaposed authentic Islamic practice and moderate Muslim living (or “balance”) to what they saw as problematic “cultural” (which included overly political) traditions. Marginalized Muslims did so partly out of concerns about resources and repression. In turn, more affluent Muslims, who generally did not understand these issues, sometimes attributed experiences of economic and political marginalization to insufficient individual striving and viewed calls for distributing economic resources differently as immoderate behavior—in other words, as causing political tensions rather than reflecting them. This perception and their hesitation after 9/11 to criticize domestic politics for fear of seeming extremist may have contributed to discouraging projects of political or economic change such as those other Sufis—including Imam Talib Abdur Rashid—engaged in. Many affluent Muslims, particularly immigrants unnerved by the level of scrutiny and policing they experienced after 9/11, hoped that avoiding political speech or action would help them be seen as moderates and deflect the attention of intelligence agencies and law enforcement. Black American Muslims,

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on the other hand, and others who had experience with police surveillance and brutality, were less hopeful about the possibility of ending such repression without dramatic action. They were also increasingly impatient with what they saw as the refusal of affluent and socially privileged Muslims—Euro-Americans and, especially, more recent immigrants who also faced discrimination—to recognize the depth of racism in America. As Imam Talib argued in 2007, immigrant Muslim leaders from Arab and South Asian countries rarely joined black Americans in protesting overt political repression or violence in the United States. For example, after the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African Muslim resident of Harlem who was shot over forty times by policemen in 1999, Imam Talib was unable to rouse any immigrant Muslim leaders to join his antibrutality protests. “What we’ve found is when domestic issues jump up, like police brutality, all the sudden we’re by ourselves.”56 I observed similar dynamics in 2006, after the death of another unarmed black American man, twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell, shot by police the night before his wedding. In late December of that year, six days after the Bell shooting, Brother Malik spoke about American Muslims’ responsibilities to address political repression regardless of the racial or even religious identity of the victims. “We need to stand up for justice whether they’re Muslims or not. Today it’s African-Americans. Tomorrow it could be someone else,” he argued during a Friday khutbah.57 No one from the mosque acknowledged his comments about Bell after the service or during the rest of the day that followed, let alone joined him in any kind of activism. While issues of political and economic marginalization and histories of repression continue to cause tension between various Muslim groups—and even contribute to different ways of understanding and living Islamic traditions— some aspects of the relations between different American Muslim populations changed after I ended my fieldwork at the mosque in 2010. The extent of police surveillance and brutality against immigrant populations since 9/11 has become public.58 Moreover, the recession of 2007–2009 and the massive protests begun in New York by the Occupy Wall Street movement, among other things, have helped to change the perspectives of many (although certainly not all) Americans by making economic inequality in the United States more apparent and by bringing attention to the challenges some face in meeting basic needs. Finally, media and political attention to a spate of police killings of unarmed black men, women, and boys (one as young as twelve) from the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2016, which gave rise both to the nationwide Black Lives M ­ atter



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movement and to horrifically violent incidents of racist backlash—including the murder by a twenty-one-year-old white man of nine black parishioners during a Wednesday night bible study in a church in South Carolina—made it increasingly difficult to deny the repression black Americans still face in the United States. More affluent Muslim immigrants, having themselves faced an increase in racist and Islamophobic violence since the Ground Zero Mosque controversy of 2010, frequently articulated a new understanding of black Americans’ experiences and a new impression of the United States during these years. As I discuss in the Chapter 7 of this book, Rauf was occasionally among them.

6 T H E PRO PHET’S FE MINIS M Women’s Labor and Women’s Leadership

O N A F R O Z E N F E B R U A R Y D AY I N 2 0 0 6 ,

Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan worked from the back of a leather-upholstered sedan winding its way across Manhattan to the State Department’s Foreign Press Center on East 52nd Street, where Rauf would film a briefing assuring US diplomats of Islam’s compatibility with American culture, economy, and politics. As the sun began to sink behind Midtown’s office towers, Rauf rested his head against the seat, closed his eyes, and gathered his thoughts. Behind the wheel, Pedram carefully navigated Friday traffic. Meanwhile, Khan read aloud a draft of the press release she would soon disseminate with Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and Rauf ’s Council of 100 colleague from the World Economic Forum, in response to the controversy over Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.1 The conversation in the car turned to the search for someone to speak in Rauf ’s place at the mosque during his absences. Dean, a dervish riding along with us, suggested Shaykha Fariha. Rauf hesitated. “We have to be careful,” he said, and informed Dean of the backlash feminist scholar Amina Wadud faced after she led a mixed-gender congregation in prayer in 2005. He also reminded Dean of an incident at Masjid al-Farah in which a knife-wielding man protested both Sufi traditions and that order’s female leadership. Khan stopped typing on her Blackberry to echo Rauf. “It’s true,” she said, giving voice to the hesitations that kept her from supporting Wadud’s activities publically at that time: “people already think we’re too liberal because we’re Sufis.”2

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With the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks drawing nearer, American Muslims were increasingly pressed to identify as moderates, particularly on issues of gender, as other Americans (even social conservatives) defined the acceptability of various Islamic traditions by comparing the status of Muslim women to liberal ideals. This was not a new trend in American history. 3 While Oprah Winfrey’s unveiling of a burqa-clad woman in Madison Square Garden in 2001 testified to the potency of such images prior to 9/11, justifying foreign wars on the grounds of saving Muslim women was a long-standing colonial tactic.4 Nevertheless, pressure on American Muslims to exemplify moderation by distancing themselves from so-called fundamentalists—not least when it came to issues of women’s roles and rights—increased significantly after the attacks. Two months after voicing her concerns about ASMA’s image, Khan stood in Union Theological Seminary’s chapel for a “Faith and Feminism” talk—an interreligious program organized by the Sister Fund. Khan was there to inform the attendees about ASMA’s work and to echo Rauf ’s message of moderation. On this occasion, promoting women’s religious leadership was central to that message and a crucial way for her to distinguish ASMA from images of Muslims who oppressed women. Fareena joined Khan at the discussion and also talked about what Sufism meant to her. As she often did when addressing non-Muslims, Fareena spoke of the aesthetic beauty of Islamic art, architecture, and poetry, and of how Sufism made Islam real to her. Before the event ended, Khan added a more liberal cast to Fareena’s presentation, explaining that Fareena was helping to train imams at the mosque as part of ASMA’s goal to make women’s Islamic leadership a reality. Someday, Khan said, she hoped that women would deliver khutbahs, too.5 Fareena did not contradict Khan that evening. Often, however, she and other women at the mosque were ambivalent about identifying with feminists—not simply because they feared appearing overly liberal, although that certainly was a factor. Rather, as we shall see, many also remained agnostic about the promises of liberal feminism and felt caught, at times, between the need to defend women’s rights and the need to defend Islam from women’s rights activists. During my fieldwork at Masjid al-Farah, I frequently observed how Fareena coached the assistant imams. After jum‘ah each week, she and several dervishes who did not have to rush back to work would wander down the block for lunch. Across long wooden picnic tables invariably littered with cups of water that one of the dervishes had served to everyone, Fareena went over each of the assistant



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imam’s khutbahs. She made sure to highlight their strengths but was not shy of chiding them if they did not follow Rauf ’s three-part model (a Qur’anic passage, followed by a portion of the Hadith, and finally an example or analogy, preferably from Sufi poetry or literature). In contrast to Khan’s description of this labor as “training imams” and simultaneously building women’s leadership, however, Fareena described it to me as part of her work for her shaykh.6 It was not something she did from a desire to expand women’s liberal rights (although this was, in some ways, a goal she held, too) and not a task she undertook for ASMA, which she and others increasingly associated with Khan, not Rauf. Rather, it was a form of pious practice meant to demonstrate her loyalty to Allah and to her spiritual mentor. It was a kind of service, an act of obedience that allowed her to be God’s instrument and that would transform her even while the labor she offered helped to transform others. Service to one’s community is a ubiquitous theme in classical Sufi literature and a mandate taken very seriously by the Halveti-Jerrahi order that Rauf and Fariha joined when they first became Sufis. Fariha’s Nur Ashki Jerrahis, for example, explain on their website that one learns adab “in the presence of the shaykh, through our full attentiveness to the teaching and our joyful service.” While many Muslims (such as the Halveti-Jerrahi of Spring Valley, New York) speak of service as part of their worship (‘ibadat) rather than as part of adab, their similar emphasis on it reflects one scholar’s assessment that service “has always been one of the first stages in the preparatory steps of the [Sufi] path, [and] remains the true Sufi’s duty throughout his life.”7 Rauf also emphasized the mandate to serve on certain occasions, describing it as an essential part of Sufism. For example, during a dhikr session in which he asked those assembled to reaffirm their commitment to the tradition and to the mission they were jointly engaged in as his dervishes, he explained that dhikr was only one part of Sufi practice. If you are committed to God—if you are the servant of God, as the prophet was, then you’re a servant of humankind . . . The servants of God are those who serve humanity. You cannot serve God and not serve humanity . . . This path is not only about dhikr. It’s also about working on yourselves, striving. And it’s a lot of striving . . . In traditional Sufi orders, the first thing you are asked is to serve.8

Despite these common emphases on service, interpretations of what it meant to work for the good of one’s community could differ dramatically, with some Sufis believing the mandate required volunteer labor within the mosque

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and ­others viewing it as an injunction to address broader social issues. In Chapter 7 I discuss how debates over service compromised the Islamic community center project in 2010. First, I focus in this chapter on the gendered dynamics of service at Masjid al-Farah, where Muslims invoked the requirements of service for multiple reasons. Doing so not only demonstrated their pious comportment and enabled them to engage in projects of self- and social transformation, it also allowed them to voice their opinions about gender relations without appealing solely to ideas of liberal rights—ideas that, although frequently evoked by Rauf and Khan, were often deployed in the broader culture to cast aspersion on Muslims.9 The Muslims I interviewed at Masjid al-Farah all agreed that authentic Islam respects women in ways not depicted in the media. For them, the actions of the Taliban were anathema. Most also criticized the strictures on women’s driving, voting, and other activities in Saudi Arabia, and many believed that head coverings were necessary only during prayers, with modesty in dress enjoined on men and women equally. Nevertheless, despite these deeply held convictions—some of which align with liberal feminist opinions—their understandings of gender roles could differ significantly. While arguing for the importance of women’s rights, particularly in contrast to what they believed to be women’s circumstances in many Muslim-majority countries, some at the mosque still thought a woman’s most important role was as a mother and caretaker and understood the appropriate relationship between men and women to be one of equality based on complementarity, not of equality based on radical sameness. This understanding was not simply a matter of ideology but something that seemed to make sense in the circumstances of their lives. Significantly, although members of the community prioritized women’s roles as mothers, they did not necessarily object to women serving as religious leaders in some capacity. As we shall see, their positions on these matters were often complicated, with the appropriateness of a particular woman’s leadership gauged not just by abstract principles or doctrine but also by a host of other factors that included the kinds of community service and care work that women engaged in. Such humble service contrasted with the aggressive drive for positioning that some dervishes associated with liberal feminism and saw as the animating impulse behind Daisy Khan’s work on Muslim women’s issues. For this and other reasons, several women distanced themselves from ASMA’s WISE project, even though they agreed with the substance of many WISE initiatives, and instead concentrated on embodying the norms of faithful servants



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and devoted mothers so prized by their community. This, many felt, guaranteed more fulfillment and respect than the options available to them (professionally and personally) as liberal or radical feminists in neoliberal America.

Liberal Rights and the Limits on Muslims To understand the gendered dynamics I observed, it is helpful to review some of the limits Muslims have run up against in encounters with liberal feminism, as well as some of the disillusionment American women have felt with the failures of second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s to achieve greater social change. First, though, it is worth remembering that feminists and womanists around the world have demonstrated the inherent difficulty of trying to define the wants and needs of women. The category “women” is intrinsically exclusionary, as no definition will ever be sufficiently capacious to represent all of the members of humanity who identify as female or who are designated as such. American Muslim women—who vary economically, ethnically, politically, and in many other ways, and who have diverse and overlapping commitments to different communities—can hardly be considered as belonging to any single population group. To make matters more complicated, Muslim women frequently find themselves spoken for instead of listened to—not simply by Muslim men, as non-Muslims may assume, but by those outside their communities who consider Muslim women’s needs, wants, and rights to be objects of study or even justification for a host of political and economic interventions.10 Trying to overcome some of these problems in recent decades, some feminists have forged multicultural and transnational alliances around positions held in common despite their differences. In the process, they have attempted to decenter the perspectives and biases of affluent, white, Western activists.11 Despite these attempts, many activists involved in such multicultural alliances still retain the suspicion of religion that characterized much second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe. Consequently, they see secularism as necessary for liberating women and a commitment to secularism as essential for forging activist coalitions. Pious women—including Muslims— have often found themselves marginalized in such alliances. This was the case in the 1990s with Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF), a British organization that first mobilized in response to backlash against Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. In the inaugural issue of their journal, editor Clara Connolly made clear the liberal secular imperative that guided the movement,

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describing the “problem of fundamentalism” as one of religion’s entanglement in the workings of the state—something, she argued, that inevitably had dire consequences for women.12 Her founding missive shows how the founders of WAF saw what they believed to be a particular kind of religion— “fundamentalism”13—as a common enemy that could rally women together despite their differences, thus producing a unified politics.14 The Women Against Fundamentalism secularist alliance fractured quickly after the British Broadcasting Company described their activities as specifically “anti-Islamic” and some Muslim women involved in WAF disaffiliated from it. Hesitant to contribute to the demonization of Muslim communities, even when they have their own concerns about issues of gender and authority within them, many American Muslim women are similarly wary of liberal feminist arguments about the need to save Muslim women from Muslim men. This is especially the case for those who oppose US wars in Muslim-majority regions, as well as those who support women’s rights and women’s equality but are not always persuaded by what they view as the (sometimes hollow) promises of liberal feminism. While some Muslim women have advocated for greater women’s religious authority in ways that accord with liberal feminist commitments, both before and after 9/11,15 others have argued for the rights to pursue less explicitly liberal religious and social arrangements, such as the right to prioritize communal solidarities over individual autonomy, or the right to function as caretakers more than breadwinners. They are not alone among American religious women in seeing complementary but different gender roles as an aspect of pious practice and an empowering source of agency, despite the fact that some liberal and radical feminists have depicted such religious affiliations and understandings of gender as constraining rather than liberating.16 Nor is it only Muslim American women from communities of color whose voices and needs have been marginalized within white liberal feminist circles. Euro-American converts to Islam are among those disillusioned with the liberal feminism they were raised with and frustrated by obstacles to women’s social and economic advancement and selfdetermination in the neoliberal environment of twenty-first century America.17 For some women, the failure of liberal feminist goals to be broadly realized in the United States has coincided with an increasing interest in the possibilities for women’s involvement in Muslim communities. After 9/11, for example, increased scrutiny from non-Muslims motivated many Muslim groups to make changes (often ones considered previously) that meant new possibilities for



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women’s authority. For example, the Islamic Society of North America elected Islamic studies professor Ingrid Mattson—formerly an adviser to the Afghan delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and an advocate of greater women’s leadership within Islam—to serve as its first female vice president in 2001 and as its first female president in 2006. Meanwhile the secondlargest Muslim group in the country, the more conservative Islamic Circle of North America, had a female speaker address its annual convention for the first time in 2002.18 Closer to home, the multiethnic New York-based group Women in Islam, founded by Aisha al-Adawiya in 1992 to create “a forum through which Muslim women could advocate on issues affecting the Islamic community generally, and women more specifically,”19 worked with the Islamic Social Services Associations on the publication of a 2005 guide for expanding women’s involvement called Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage.20 The booklet received support from ISNA, ICNA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Canada), the Muslim Alliance in North America, the Muslim Association of Canada, and the national division of the Muslim Students’ Association. Then, in November 2006, Daisy Khan held a similarly inspired international conference to inaugurate her WISE ­project. In addition to building a global network of Muslim women leaders, the conference launched Khan’s program to train Muslim women from around the world as muftias (interpreters of Islamic legal traditions).21 Most of the women I interviewed at Masjid al-Farah were not involved with WISE. Nor were most aware of the debates over gender that had taken place in Muslim communities across the country in preceding decades. This is undoubtedly because many were recent Euro-American converts to Islam or immigrants—often successful professionals from Canada, Pakistan, and ­Bangladesh—who did not affiliate with national Muslim organizations. Nevertheless, several described the practice of Islam they encountered at the mosque and at Sufi dhikr services as liberating—from the sexual objectification they experienced outside of the mosque and from some of the seemingly impossible standards of liberal feminism—and uniquely egalitarian in comparison to other Islamic traditions. Some, but not all, described this as a result of Sufism. Women’s large-scale involvement in Sufi orders is a relatively recent phenomenon; historically, most were excluded from Sufi “brotherhoods.” Although their current participation may be due, in part, to the exposure of Sufi leaders to liberal discourses and ideas, the women I encountered at Masjid al-Farah did

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not regard participation in Sufi practice as simply a recent liberal development. Rather, like Rauf and Khan, they saw it as among the rights originally promised to women in classical Islamic texts and as something hampered more recently by so-called fundamentalists. Rauf—and sometimes Khan—explicitly argued for the confluence of women’s liberal rights and Islamic traditions, with Rauf ’s 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam, marketed directly to those who identify as “American feminist[s]” and a chapter of his subsequent book, Moving the Mountain, devoted to illuminating “the Prophet’s feminism.”22 Yet other Sufis still differed over whether and how well the United States secured women’s rights, as well as over how American versions of liberal equality matched up with what they believed to be authentic Islam and moderation.

Faith and Fears after 9/11 A young American woman I often saw at the masjid and, occasionally, at ASMA interfaith events gave voice to the simultaneous disillusionment with liberal feminism and wariness of Islam that many female converts I interviewed felt before joining the community. Deborah, a petite, curly-haired woman I met early in my fieldwork, had converted to Islam from Catholicism in 2004, prior to marrying her Muslim boyfriend—a story I found to be common among female converts. While unaware of Rauf ’s 2004 book on how Islam embodies tenets of American liberalism, Deborah had heard the imam reiterate this message in his Friday khutbahs. Although she, too, was a staunch defender of “inalienable rights” and found Rauf ’s message appealing, her life experiences had caused her to question the extent to which women could achieve the same professional successes that men did in the United States. Like other women I interviewed, she eventually came to believe Islam taught the kind of respect for women that American society was lacking. The transition from fearing Islam to finding empowerment in it was not necessarily an easy one.23 In many ways it is not surprising that Deborah and several other women I interviewed were disillusioned with what American society offers women, despite Rauf ’s continual insistence that liberal rights for both genders are divinely inspired and ordained, and that the United States ensures these rights better than any other nation. The Equal Rights Amendment, proposed in 1972 to prohibit inequalities based on sex, expired for lack of ratification after passing both houses of Congress, leaving the ideal of “equal pay for equal work,” among other things, an unrealized dream. During the years I conducted in-



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terviews (primarily in 2007, before the Great Recession), women who came of age steeped in the egalitarian sentiments of second-wave feminism continued to earn approximately 20 percent less than men for work in the same occupations, with women of color earning even less than that. Because these statistics account only for women employed full time, they likely reflect the wages of women with highly remunerated careers more than the wages of women whose smaller salaries caused them to choose to be primary caretakers and work only part time after having children.24 For several women of child-bearing age, it seemed obvious that men should be breadwinners and women should raise children—not because women were biologically equipped to nourish infants (although some did argue this), but because women would sacrifice far less of the family income than their male partners by cutting back employment. With many families unable to afford the astronomical cost of childcare in New York City—especially care for children under two, which was both more expensive and less available25—having the mother stay at home felt less optimal than it did inevitable, less a principled decision than a necessity. Furthermore, recent research suggests that even women in high-paying, high-profile jobs—particularly those who work in occupations associated with male labor or achievement—feel pressure to revert to conventional gender arrangements at home by performing more of the labor associated with women’s work there.26 Facing such situations, several women— including Deborah—expressed comfort in what they perceived to be Islam’s insistence on complementary gender roles rather than on radical equality. Once they decided that the mosque community sufficiently respected women, their choices to embody the roles of devoted mothers and humble servants gave them a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment rather than disillusionment at failing to achieve equal status professionally. As the sun began to glint off the windows of the residential towers surrounding her apartment one late spring afternoon, with her infant son napping down the hall, Deborah sat across from me on her couch in jeans and a t-shirt, legs tucked up under her, and explained how she thought through these issues. Before converting, and even for some time after, she admitted, she was wary of Islam because I was uneasy about things having to do with a woman and women’s rights. I think it was more because . . . you sort of felt like there was a separation between men and women [in Islam] and the woman were in charge of the household and the home and the man is supposed to be the support of the women. And that

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was something that I was a little bit uneasy about but, later on . . . I started to question, “why is it that we seem to think that being in charge of the home and the family is somehow inferior to going out and getting a job?” And it’s almost like, as Americans, I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that. The more I read, the more I realized that the tone in the Qur’an never, ever gives any impression that this is somehow inferior. In fact, it says just the opposite: that this is the woman’s home. She is the caretaker. She is, you know? And the man’s job is really to earn the money to support the woman and the home. And then there are very clear regulations about money and that if a woman has her own money that’s hers to keep.

Like several other female converts, Deborah’s fears of unequal treatment kept her from converting for some time, even when there were other aspects of Islamic tradition that resonated deeply with her. Also like most women converts I interviewed, Deborah came from a religious background and never would have identified as secular or irreligious but also never felt completely comfortable with the doctrines of her parents.27 Deborah finally decided to convert in 2004, after successfully searching the Qur’an for solace after George W. Bush’s reelection: “I was just, like, how could this happen? How could people vote for him? I was just so upset . . . But the Qur’an says not to concern yourself with unbelievers, and I realize that this could be what it meant.” Not long after that, she told me, she felt more assurance about the respect Islam had for women, especially those oriented toward family. It is not insignificant that, during this time of questioning whether she could convert, Deborah started attending Masjid al-Farah, a mosque that upended her expectations and assuaged some of the concerns she had about male-female separation. Deborah first attended Masjid al-Farah after her fiancé assured her it was “non-judgmental.” Like Emily, another Euro-American convert who first attended the mosque at the behest of her boyfriend, part of what Deborah found so attractive there was that women who attended prayers could see, hear, and experience everything directly instead of listening to the Friday service over a speaker in a different room or on a different floor from the men. The only barrier separating men and women was a three-inch high row of wooden book holders, emptied of the Qur’ans they sometimes held and lined end-to-end to mark a division of space. While there was sometimes a bit of gendered jockeying over the placement of this symbolic barrier, prayers at Masjid al-Farah were very different from what Deborah, Emily, Leah (a blonde former Presbyterian from Long Island), and others had experienced at other mosques in the city,



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and from what media images “of the way it is practiced in Saudi Arabia” had led them to expect.28 Because Friday prayers are required only of men, some of these women felt that their practices of attending jum‘ah should be recognized with, if not praise, at the very least equal access to opportunities for pious engagement. Masjid al-Farah gave them this. The spatial arrangement was not the only thing different, many women told me; so was their access to the religious leadership. For the first time, they said, they were able to ask questions of an imam who responded with undivided attention. For Deborah and Emily, this imam not only answered their questions and led them through the conversion process of taking the shahada (repeating the prayer and statement of faith), he eventually performed their marriage ceremonies. In many ways, these activities comfortingly resembled those of the ministers and priests who pastored the churches these women had left. The removal of spatial barriers and the increased access to the imam that many women found so important was only magnified when they attended dhikr. Even prior to converting, several women made a practice of attending Rauf ’s weekly Sufi meetings on Friday nights. Men and women sat separately at these gatherings, but without even a row of book holders between them. Far from feeling segregated, women who attended often felt welcomed into the inner circle of the community. At least four of the women I interviewed had also attended Thursday night dhikrs at the mosque. At those meetings, their concerns about women’s equality were further alleviated. Not only were the meetings led by a woman (Shaykha Fariha or one of her protégées), but the celebrations and discussions over food afterward frequently also involved commentary on the beauty of “feminine religious energy.” For those who came to know about ASMA, Khan’s 2006 program on ­women’s equality served as additional confirmation that the community would respect their rights. And even those who did not know much about ASMA— such as Deborah, who was unaware of the organization despite having attended a joint Ramadan-Rosh Hashanah dinner that ASMA sponsored in 2006—or who were unsure what to think of WISE could plainly see that women were integral to the functioning of the mosque and the Sufi communities within it. Not only was the building that housed the mosque owned by a woman who led the Sufi order that met there, but one of her dervishes, Amrita, helped to manage the finances: collecting donations at the end of each service, saving some to go toward the upkeep of the mosque, and parceling out money to Muslims in need. Meanwhile, Fareena was clearly the organizational heart of Rauf ’s Sufi

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group. She was the one everyone asked about the time and location of dhikr, as well as about where Rauf was when he was absent and how long it would be until he returned. She was the one who shepherded the assistant imams and others to lunch each week, who had the phone numbers of all of the community members, and who would call or email people with changes of plans or new opportunities for getting together. She was also usually the one to speak to visiting groups of non-Muslims when jum‘ah services concluded, answering their questions about all manner of theological issues. And (although only some dervishes knew this) she was the first one Rauf called when he needed someone to speak in his place at a church, school, or other institution. The prominence of women in the mosque, at dhikr services, and at ASMA was a reassuring aspect of these communities for many female converts, one that initially stood in contrast to what they thought they knew Islam to be and that, over time, exemplified for them what authentic Islam really is. Yet not everyone who attended Masjid al-Farah approved of all of the activities of these Sufi communities or of the gender arrangements within them. While several Sufis (male and female) attended the meetings of both Rauf and F ­ ariha or alternated between them, others either thought it necessary to follow a single shaykh instead of two, or simply did not believe it acceptable to follow a female leader at all. These and other disagreements surfaced most frequently when Rauf was away for various Cordoba Initiative projects and left many dervishes searching for their own ways to create community coherence and to resolve crises, as I explain below. Before turning to those topics, I examine what Rauf and the other imams at Masjid al-Farah communicated to Friday congregants about gender relations and how various community members invoked notions of service—particularly, gendered labor—when attempting to reconcile American liberal rights rhetoric with what they believed to be Islamic teachings about the rightful roles of women.

Public Pronouncements and Personal Interpretations of Women’s Roles and Rights Female converts were not the only ones to have different experiences at Masjid al-Farah than at other mosques in the city. As Abdul-Raheem, one frequent attendee, explained to me, the ratio of women to men at the masjid had often startled newcomers in previous years, with women making up nearly half of Friday worshippers until shortly before I began my fieldwork. Surprised by this



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information—women made up no more than ten percent of worshippers during most of my years of attending—I inquired about the shift. Abdul-Raheem explained that it was due in large part to the rising number of male Senegalese worshippers at the mosque. This was something he thought himself responsible for, as he had informed several Senegalese Sufis who worked on Canal Street about the “Sufi mosque” nearby.29 After that, and after another mosque in the area closed, the number of male worshipers increased so rapidly that Masjid al-Farah began offering two services each Friday instead of one (the practice there when I began fieldwork), and then moved to three services or even four during Ramadan. While Abdul-Raheem’s anecdotal account of the change explains it in part, I noticed a different trend during my years of observation: that the quantity of female worshipers at the mosque correlated with Rauf ’s appearances there. While there was never a day when I was the only woman in attendance, the number of female worshipers was generally larger when Rauf was in town and declined precipitously the longer he traveled. A few women—professionals who had joined Rauf ’s Sufi order at some point but who also had busy work schedules—told me directly that they made a special effort to attend jum‘ah when they knew Rauf would be speaking. This was because of what Rauf said during his khutbahs, of course, but also because of what he did not say. Not only did Rauf differ from imams at some other mosques in the city when it came to ideas about gender roles, he differed from his own father—whom he credited with giving him an informal theological education—and from the other imams who spoke during Friday jum‘ah services at Masjid al-Farah. While Rauf did discuss issues of gender in his writings, he generally refrained from doing so at the mosque. In contrast, other imams sometimes dedicated significant portions of their sermons to what they believed was a woman’s highest calling: motherhood. This message appealed to some women, but working professionals were not always among them. Rauf borrowed generously from his father’s writings on the shari‘ah and on the compatibility of Islam with democracy and capitalism, as I have discussed. Nevertheless, he did not generally have his assistants and dervishes read his father’s work. This was at least in part because of Muhammad Abdul-Rauf ’s teachings about women. In his 1972 book, Marriage in Islam: a Manual, and elsewhere, Abdul-Rauf had described motherhood as a woman’s most important role and as one crucial to maintaining a just and pious social order.30 He continued to make this case in print as late as 1987, arguing that women’s active

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participation in the work force diminished the energy they had for their families and contributed to social strain. Rather than aspiring “to compete with men in production and in outside work,” which results in “giving lesser attention to their husbands and lesser care to their children,” Abdul-Rauf held, pious women should concentrate on inculcating Islamic traditions in younger generations.31 Although Rauf did not generally discuss his father’s teachings even with close associates, his dervishes—seeking guidance on various issues during his absences—eventually discovered these materials for themselves. After Fareena found Abdul-Rauf ’s books while searching for alternatives to water-based ablutions before prayer—structural damage from constant use of the small restroom sinks on the second floor for wudu had led Fariha to close the restrooms—she asked Rauf on his return to New York why he had not made these resources available earlier. “You didn’t give us your father’s stuff,” she told him accusingly. “I’ve been reading and I ordered the books . . . there’s everything in there, including about wudu!” In response, Rauf hesitantly cautioned Fareena about sharing his father’s writings with others.32 While professional women might object to Muhammad Abdul-Rauf ’s ideas about women’s work, several others—including Brother Malik, Faiz Khan, ­Fareena, and a few young American female converts—found points of commonality with such teachings. For them, motherhood was a powerfully evocative theme. Of the assistant imams, Brother Malik brought up gendered aspects of Islamic life most frequently in his khutbahs. While Brother Malik had never made much money, he had always worked hard to support his wife and children, and in his khutbahs often stressed what he described as the “noble” and “chivalrous” qualities of proper Muslim practices and the complementary gender roles that went along with them. Like many other black American Muslims, Malik believed it was essential to encourage male responsibility for family and society. He sometimes saw the demands of (frequently white) liberal feminists as undermining both the supports needed in black communities and the longfought-for family continuity that slavery and poverty had denied them.33 While women’s labor—particularly mothering—was crucial for creating and maintaining family and community cohesion, he believed, it was black men who really needed the encouragement to lead. Until he left the community in 2006, Faiz Khan also focused on complementary models of gender relations and emphasized motherhood in his ­khutbahs. Different from Malik in that he overtly supported women’s religious leadership in his writing34—and also different in that he was raised in a family



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of professionals, which included two older sisters who had careers as doctors— Faiz still did not promote radical gender equality at the masjid. Rather, in that setting he emphasized the social and spiritual importance ascribed to motherhood in the Qur’an, frequently comparing the love of God to the connection between a mother and child. Doing so allowed him to assert the importance of women by relying on Islamic tradition rather than by arguing in the language of liberal rights feminism. For Faiz, motherhood is central to Abrahamic covenants between God and his people—something, as he discussed in a khutbah in January 2006, he saw reflected in the Qur’anic story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, ­Ishmael. Rather than focusing on the men in the story (Abraham and Ishmael) when relating it to Friday worshippers, Faiz turned attention to the often-­ forgotten woman in the narrative. “One should not think solely of the sacrifice of Ishmael, but also of Hajar, who sacrificed her child. Men can never understand the power of a woman’s response when she sees that her child is in danger,” Faiz said, choking up. “I see it all the time in my emergency room . . .” Maternal love had recently become a more powerful theme for Faiz. During the previous year, he and his wife (also a doctor) had moved to Pennsylvania for a residency position. Although Faiz visited the mosque less frequently after that, I had a chance to catch up with him in the spring of 2005 when he delivered a guest lecture at Union Theological Seminary. He told me then that they were expecting their first child. I did not see him again at the mosque until January 2006, by which point he was a new father. Motherhood was not only something he witnessed in his ER now, but something he also observed intimately every day, and he was not alone among Rauf ’s dervishes in finding new meaning in parenting. After jum‘ah, Fareena turned to me with what was more an exclamation than a question: “Wasn’t Faiz’s khutbah beautiful?!” She and her American husband were nearly the same age as Faiz and his wife and had also recently started a family. Months later, lamenting the loss of Faiz, Fareena reminisced about how they found a sense of community through their service to their shaykh.35 This sense of connection was crucial to Fareena at that time, not least because she had moved to New York in order to pursue a graduate degree, leaving her parents in Bangladesh. Upon graduation she had taken a job at the U.N. but had given up that position when she had her first child. The mosque and Sufi community brought both familiarity and continuity to her life amid these many changes and gave her fulfillment and meaning. None of this had come without costs, but Fareena did not consider the sacrifice of her professional life

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for motherhood to be among them. Unlike Deborah, Leah, and Emily, whom I saw less often after they had children, Fareena had the help of a nanny and rarely missed a jum‘ah service or dhikr session, even after the birth of her second child in 2006. Instead of feeling forced out of her professional position by the exigencies of motherhood in New York City, Fareena was more able than several other new mothers at the masjid to feel that she had chosen to trade her career for more meaningful activities—not just motherhood, but also service to her shaykh and to a religious community that compensated for her lack of professional contacts. Additionally, because Fareena was as close to Faiz as a sister (in her words), she knew that he supported women’s professional equality with men even when he emphasized their maternal roles. What other women—professionals and stay-at-home mothers—heard as advice to focus on children, Fareena recognized as a strategy to emphasize the importance of women in a way Muslims of various perspectives could appreciate. Even if other professional women had recognized this about Faiz, however, it would likely have made little difference in their desires to attend the mosque in Rauf ’s absence, as Faiz no longer affiliated with ASMA or spoke at Masjid al-Farah after 2006. Instead, Brother Malik, Pedram, and a host of other young Muslim men took turns speaking during the three services each Friday. Feeling the loss of a sympathetic religious leader when Rauf was away, some women stopped attending the mosque and dhikr services almost completely, while other women—and some men, too—sought guidance, acceptance, and affirmation from Shaykha Fariha. Attending Fariha’s Nur Ashki order provided these dervishes with a needed sense of community again for a short time. But performing dhikr under a female shaykh did not necessarily change their ideas about women’s rights and roles. While neither Fariha, who was childless, nor her dervishes gave much emphasis to motherhood, women’s labor and humble service was still the norm within her community and one that resonated with both men and women.

Women’s Labor as Women’s Leadership About half of the Sufi women who attended Masjid al-Farah affiliated exclusively with Rauf ’s order, while others favored what Deborah described as the “celebratory” atmosphere of Fariha’s music-filled ceremonies. Keesha, a multiracial convert with a multireligious family, who was unmarried and did not



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have children, explained to me that she was first drawn to Masjid al-Farah and to Rauf ’s Sufi services after seeing Daisy Khan in a film screened at the Asia Society cultural center. (Keesha had previously converted to Islam while studying abroad in Morocco and was attracted to Khan’s dynamism and eloquence.) She was further drawn in by Rauf ’s habit of excavating the “inner” meanings of the shari‘ah for his dervishes. For a time, Keesha attended both Rauf ’s Friday Sufi gatherings and Fariha’s Thursday meetings, but she ultimately decided to affiliate exclusively with Fariha’s order. Keesha did not believe she was losing out on the education Rauf provided because, in her opinion, Fariha “does everything directly in line with the shari‘ah,” although she acknowledged that some people would not expect a female leader to focus on orthodoxy, since many assumed she was already violating it. Additionally, Keesha regarded Fariha’s Sufi services as “the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”36 Keesha’s decision to affiliate with Fairha’s order rather than Rauf ’s may seem, from her description, to have been based on aesthetics rather than gender dynamics. It was likely much more complicated than that, however, as language about aesthetic differences often served as a marker of gender distinctions in this community. What Deborah described as the “celebratory” atmosphere of the Nur Ashki dhikrs and Keesha termed their “beautiful” qualities, Sufis affiliated with Rauf ’s order (particularly men) often labeled too “otherworldly” and “ethereal.” This was because Fariha’s dhikrs involved a kind of ecstatic practice, including singing and dancing, that is highly improvisational and can be highly unregulated—something that Rauf disallowed at his dhikrs and that he and several of his dervishes regarded as excessively emotional—a gendered term if ever there was one. In contrast, several of Rauf ’s closest dervishes focused on what they regarded as the more rational traditions associated with Sufi philosophers and conducted themselves with quiet restraint during dhikr—chanting rather than singing and never rising from their seats.37 ­Framing these differences in terms of Islamic tradition, Rauf frequently employed an analogy popular with both Sufi practitioners and scholars of Islam. He cautioned against the excesses of “drunk” Sufi traditions and encouraged the quiet, contemplative, and controlled practices of “sober” Sufism.38 In addition to employing gender-inflected descriptions of the differences between these dhikrs, Keesha indicated in other ways that concerns about women’s roles and rights had influenced her choice partly, but not entirely, in a manner that can be explained with reference to liberal gender ideals. Keesha’s father was a Muslim, and she was unique among the female converts I inter-

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viewed in not having had fears before converting about the ostensible mistreatment of women in Islam. This did not mean that she did not have concerns about Muslim women she felt were oppressed elsewhere. “The woman issue . . . what’s going on with women in the world, it’s extraordinarily disheartening. It’s painful,” she told me, and her strong commitment to liberal ideals and to more radical tactics for securing them, as I discuss below, prevented her from being as satisfied as other converts seemed to be with the selective ways Rauf and Khan promoted gender equality. Nevertheless, the mistreatment of some Muslim women by some Muslim men was not something that she worried was inherent to Islamic tradition. I asked Keesha if she had attended Khan’s 2006 WISE program. She said she had not and explained that, having studied political science as an undergraduate, she did not find Khan’s initiative (then in its infancy) sufficient to address the politics behind the problems women faced. I don’t want to talk about it and write a paper on it and then people go and think about it in a Harvard classroom. You know, that’s not going to affect the fact that there are policies in the world that say men can kill women if they’re raped, family members can . . . These are countries that are friends with us. That has to change and we have the power to change it.

Americans were reluctant to criticize countries where women’s rights were violated, Keesha argued, because they got things they wanted from governments that tolerated or encouraged such behavior. Furthermore, she believed, even those who recognize such problems feared being attacked: American moderate Muslims . . . agree about this. People that Imam Feisal speaks to, they agree with him, you know. They just don’t want to say anything. There’s a war in Islam that’s just not being waged between moderates and fundamentalism. People are afraid of the fundamentalist Muslims because they have guns and other items. And I think that, we have a war in Islam that won’t be waged because moderates just don’t want to fight, they don’t want to fight.

For Keesha, who echoed Rauf ’s portrayal of extremists, fundamentalism was synonymous with gender violence. Fariha’s leadership as the female shaykh of a Sufi order seemed to be one way of courageously fighting against such interpretations. Furthermore, Fariha was more outspoken than Rauf and Khan about American injustices such as the wars that led to hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Although Keesha did not want to focus on



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how Fariha’s upbringing in a wealthy, white Texas oil family allowed her more opportunities and social latitude than other American Muslims, it is worth considering the greater difficulty Rauf and Khan had as Arab and South Asian immigrants, respectively, in critiquing American foreign policy after 9/11.) As important as these things were to Keesha, however, they were not what she emphasized most about Fariha. Rather, the main distinction she drew between the two Sufi communities centered on how Fariha exemplified what Keesha felt a true Muslim should be: “a servant of humanity.” Part of Fariha’s allure was that she reminded Keesha of all of the ways her comportment, her relations with others, could be better. Whereas Keesha often found herself distracted by what she considered to be frivolous worldly concerns, she thought of Fariha as completely concentrated on developing a closer relationship with the Divine and helping others to do likewise. “That’s servanthood,” Keesha told me. Fariha was so devoted to her religious practice and to her dervishes, Keesha explained, that “she gives her whole being and her whole self at all times—I mean to the point where her husband is stopping her. He gets so mad [because she exhausts herself].” Fariha, Keesha explained, wanted everyone to “become a real servant and a real giver, which is something that is very difficult to become. That means you have to go through the core of your soul and become a natural giver like Isa [Arabic for Jesus] was, you know?” I asked Keesha if she thought Fariha might have more time to engage in religious activities because she did not have to worry about earning an income. “But it’s not the money, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Keesha insisted, misunderstanding my question. Instead—inadvertently confirming my point about being free from financial worries—she explained that it was about engaging in the practices that cause a person to let go of worldly concerns and distractions and to become a more complete human being. “And service is obviously the biggest one.” That was why Keesha had decided to go to Fariha’s Sufi meetings. “I like trying to be a better servant. I use Shaykha as my example . . . It’s natural to her, so I want it to be natural to me to be able to do that, you know?” Keesha was far from alone in seeing willingness to serve others as a primary attribute of the devoted Sufi dervish and, even more, the exemplary Sufi leader. Even those who viewed Fariha’s leadership as unorthodox and unacceptable— contrary, in their opinions, to the dictates of shari‘ah—emphasized this theme. They often did so in different gender-inflected ways, however, using the idea of voluntary service as a way of evaluating the propriety of various women’s activities. In fact, the discussions about behavior I heard at Masjid al-Farah from

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2004 to 2010 suggest that some Muslims’ abilities to tolerate differences over women’s rights and conduct depended on two familiar factors: how economically privileged the women seemed to be and the extent to which they engaged in recognizable forms of gendered labor—the voluntary and unremunerated care for others that is often described as “service.” Male Sufis’ varying attitudes toward Fariha, Daisy, Fareena, and other women are illuminating here. Daisy had left a corporate career to promote positions for women jurists in Islamic institutions and to prove the Islamic legitimacy of women’s social, political, and economic leadership. During my years of fieldwork, she did not publically support women-led prayer, a more controversial issue than women’s active involvement in the mosque or institutional leadership.39 Although neither did she play the other roles emphasized within the community: of supporting the mosque through volunteer work or of having children. And yet, the same dervishes who disapproved of Daisy’s activities expressed appreciation for Amrita—a Pakistani-Canadian activist for womenled prayer who sometimes worked in corporate advertising. Because Amrita promoted women leaders and liberal rights, hailed from an affluent family, and did not even wear hijab when praying—instead she often wore a faux-fur hat of distinctly hipster vintage that covered her ears but not her neck—this may seem surprising. Amrita was also a single mother who performed a significant amount of labor for the mosque and for her Sufi community. And as more than one dervish informed me, Amrita worked in corporate advertising only when working with nonprofits could not pay the bills. Amrita’s daily care for her children and her voluntary duties with the mosque and community meant that her life deviated in important ways from the autonomous individualism that has been traditionally marked as white and male. In contrast, to many people at the mosque, Daisy Khan’s high-profile political engagement and continuing corporate-related activities, including her corporate style of leading a nonprofit, seemed less acceptable and less moderate. It is also useful here to consider the way Fareena was seen at the mosque. Despite their ambivalence or even antipathy toward Daisy, many Sufis held Fareena in high regard. She had left her career at the U.N. in order to raise her children, and she spent much of her time serving the community. Further, although Fareena, like Daisy and Fariha, was financially stable, she was also quite generous with money. In addition to praising her labors as a mother and supportive wife, several male members of the group appreciated how—as they framed it—Fareena used her husband’s income from corporate finance



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to aid less fortunate Muslims and worked to organize the community and create solidarity within it. Shaykha Fariha was generous, too, of course; without her financial support, Masjid al-Farah would not exist. However, not only did she, like Daisy, promote women’s public leadership, she controlled access to the mosque in ways that some of Rauf ’s dervishes disliked, making it unavailable outside of prayer times. In contrast, Fareena’s exemplary service often consisted of the sort of unpaid labor commonly associated with women’s care work and women’s religious volunteerism in the United States. Significantly, in addition to praising Fareena’s service, the assistant imams treated her as a religious authority of sorts and accepted her guidance on how they should shape their messages for Friday prayers and the various inter­ faith gatherings where they routinely spoke. The difference in attitude toward ­Fareena and Daisy Khan was surely due, in no small part, to the fact that ­Fareena often served as Rauf ’s spokesperson when he was away, whereas—in the opinion of many of Rauf ’s dervishes—Khan was responsible for keeping him away so often on lecture tours or fundraising trips. Yet, because many of Rauf ’s absences were explicitly related to Cordoba activities—ones that he often pursued independent of ASMA’s programs—their choice to blame Khan for them seemed to reflect prior sentiments toward her more than unbiased assessments of Rauf ’s actions. While most male dervishes were ambivalent about Khan’s work to support female Muslim leaders, many female dervishes felt that other issues were more pressing in their own lives than those Khan focused on, including their inability after becoming mothers to stay connected to the community that had given their lives such shape and meaning. As some had discovered with regard to their professional goals, having children often meant losing opportunities and connections. Because childcare was not available at the mosque or at dhikr, and because Rauf, in contrast to some Sufi leaders (including Shaykh Tosun Bayrak, leader of the Spring Valley Halveti-Jerrahis), did not view such religious meetings as family affairs or want young children to attend them, many women were unable to remain active members of the community once they embodied the role of motherhood so prized within it. Even women who were able to regularly attend jum‘ah and dhikr often refrained from going if Rauf was absent, as most dervishes knew one another only through him and did not generally associate with each other otherwise. Rauf ’s presence was what made the meetings socially and religiously fulfilling. Following the death of one woman’s mother in early 2007, for example, Fareena

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chided other members of the group for not trying harder to forge connections. “We’re supposed to be a community!” she admonished. Although she maintained contact with many of the dervishes, others seldom reached out to each other between meetings before then. Feeling acutely disconnected during this time, as Rauf began spending longer periods working from his Malaysia office, some dervishes responded by making the dhikr group more stable and more community-oriented. Interpreting Rauf ’s injunctions to serve the community in ways that fit their circumstances, however, they also began to exercise more independence from Rauf and Khan—something that later contributed to the tensions over purpose and direction that split the community during the Ground Zero Mosque debate of 2010.

Conclusion: Community Cohesion and the Double-Edged Sword of Service The dissatisfaction members of Rauf ’s group felt when he was away grew markedly in 2006 and early 2007. For a while, filling in for Rauf at the mosque or interreligious events helped some of his closest assistants feel connected to him. As ASMA changed, becoming less oriented toward Sufism in 2006, and as Rauf began working more regularly from Malaysia on Cordoba’s Shariah Project, however, acting as Rauf ’s surrogates was no longer as satisfying for these Sufis, to say nothing of Rauf ’s other dervishes. In the meantime, as mentioned above, several dervishes had begun to feel less connected to Daisy Khan, whose apartment served as their dhikr location. The sense of dissatisfaction and disconnection among Rauf ’s dervishes became even more noticeable after Faiz Khan left the community and members of Rauf ’s dhikr group found themselves lacking a stable location for their weekly meeting. They had gathered in Khan’s apartment every Friday for years, but her and Rauf ’s travel schedule made this increasingly untenable. After an evening of attempting to hold dhikr in a Times Square Starbucks because Khan’s apartment was again unavailable at the last minute, the dervishes pooled their resources and rented a separate location for meetings. Their first evening there was a watershed moment for many in the community. Although the space—a carpeted storage room in a municipal office belonging to the interfaith New Seminary—was less than ideal, a sense of purpose infused the members of the group as they carried out the massage tables usually stowed there and installed the plastic filing cabinet that would hold extra



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sets of prayer beads, a few wall hangings to be put up each Friday evening, and laminated copies of the wird (the portion of the Qur’an chanted during dhikr). As mariachi music drifted up from the Friday night festivities in the Mexican restaurant below, Fareena assigned people weekly tasks. Mine was to attend to the buzzer each time someone rang, something that occurred throughout the evening, as dervishes came late to the meeting and others arrived to attend classes in other rooms. The location had none of the comforts of Khan’s ­apartment—not only was there no kitchen for making meals after dhikr, but food was disallowed entirely—and lacked the familiar feel conveyed by the bookcase full of Rauf ’s favorite texts and the bulletin board on which Daisy or dervishes posted pictures and news clippings. Nonetheless, a distinctly communal ethos began to emerge that night as these dervishes cooperated, financially and physically, in creating and leading their new, reconstituted, and rather independent community. Less than a month after his dervishes established this new dhikr location, Rauf returned to New York. The air at the mosque was electric with anticipation that day, as dervishes I had not seen for months, exhilarated by the chance to see their shaykh, came back to jum‘ah and attended dhikr later that night. Despite the ban on food in their new space, they brought Syrian pastries to celebrate Rauf ’s homecoming. Rauf raised their spirits greatly at the beginning of the evening when he commended them on taking the initiative to keep up their practices. At the same time, he encouraged them—as Daisy Khan had done the week before, when the dervishes collectively returned to her apartment for one last, and rather tense, gathering in that space—to think of their previous dhikr location as one of their permanent homes. (Although neither Rauf nor Khan mentioned it, ASMA had listed Khan’s one-bedroom apartment in their original Internal Revenue Service (IRS) application for tax-exempt status as a meeting place for up to 400 worshipers each week—a figure they optimistically aspired to but never reached—and the dervishes’ move to another location could have financial repercussions in several ways, thus diminishing the resources available for the community center.) The celebratory mood that night did not last, as Rauf was not in New York to stay. Rather, his visit was meant to prepare his dervishes for a new reality in which they would see him even less frequently. After blessing their new location, Rauf reemphasized his role as their shaykh by recounting a dream he had had over fifteen years earlier, in which he accepted the mantle of the Halveti-Jerrahi order. (He made no mention of his Qadiri affiliation on this

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particular occasion.) From that time on, Rauf said, he knew he would eventually lead dhikr services, even though he promised Daisy when they married in 1996 that he would not become a shaykh. (Hearing Daisy’s name, Brother Malik raised his head and exchanged wary glances with Fareena.) Rauf recalled that he had told Khan then, “‘I don’t want to be a shaykh. I don’t want to have more dependents. I have enough dependents in my own children’” from an earlier marriage. “But,” he later concluded, “when something is destined, you cannot avoid it.” “The reason I am giving you this talk,” Rauf finally admitted, “is because I’m going to be doing a lot of travel” to continue being “involved in the bridging of the West with the Islamic world. Because of that, I have to rely on many of you here to assume various responsibilities regarding the work of the tariqa . . . I’ll be demanding your commitment.” Rauf acknowledged that he was “not keen on having many disciples. That is not my objective, to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of whom I can call my disciples. I’m only interested in those who are keen to commit themselves to the spiritual path,” he told them, wearily. He seemed exhausted by the travel from which he had just returned and by the thought of that he was about to undertake. Because he would be less available to his dervishes and more reliant on their labor to keep the tariqa going, Rauf urged them to recommit themselves to him as their shaykh and to the order as their community only if they could accept these conditions. For those who would undertake the more “difficult path” laid out for this “special community,” Rauf encouraged them “to take care of each other, to serve each other and to serve the tariqa. And you will discover that no matter how much you give—the internal investment is very high—the return on what you give is going to be much deeper and much greater.”40 After delivering these exhortations, Rauf and his dervishes performed their dhikr. When it was over, they communed over sweets and tea, and then the dervishes watched as Rauf took his packed bags to the waiting cab that would take him again to the airport. In the months that followed, some of Rauf ’s dervishes attempted to do what Rauf had asked and create a closer community that had less need of his immediate presence. Others sought additional inspiration and guidance elsewhere. A few began to attend both Fariha’s dhikr services and Rauf ’s. Perceiving this as, at the least, a distraction for his dervishes from their mission under him, Rauf instructed them to refrain from attending any other orders’ meetings. Further, he asked them not to involve those who did not belong to the order in dhikr services; in other words, no more visitors. For several of his dervishes, these



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developments—which many experienced as another narrowing of their community after Rauf asked them not to associate with Faiz Khan—contrasted with what they had previously seen as their shaykh’s characteristic openness. Steeped in the ideas Rauf had spent years conveying to them—that they had more commonalities with other religious Americans than differences—some dervishes resisted this insular turn by finding ambivalence in Rauf ’s instructions, by interpreting them in ways that restored their previous understandings of their shaykh, or by outright questioning them. The interpretive strategies they used to keep their community as inclusive as possible gained greater importance over the next year as Fareena left New York to move to Singapore with her husband and children, as Brother Malik was hospitalized with a long-term illness that complicated his efforts to stand in for Rauf, and as several cosmopolitan young Muslims who worked in finance lost their jobs during the recession and returned to their countries of origin. In addition to these dervishes, the Sufi group lost another regular attendee in 2007: me. I had spent over three years with the community during a time of intense change, but I recognized this period as a particularly difficult one and—as an ethnographer, not a dervish—respected Rauf ’s desire not to have outside observers charting all of the tensions within it. I still attended the masjid each week for some time after Rauf instituted his changes but progressively less often during the years of 2009 and 2010. I did not anticipate how disappointed some of Rauf ’s dervishes would be by my absence. The assistant imams still sought my attendance at dhikr during those years, saying that “Shaykh Feisal” had surely not meant that I was not to come. Their disappointment over my decision to refrain was palpable. Not only had I become a friend to many people—I realized through conversations in the early months of 2007, when some dervishes began to build greater connections to others within the group, that I knew more about most of them than they did about each other—but I was also a potential convert with whom they had deep, and mutual, sympathies. Over the years, during official interviews and otherwise, I had had numerous conversations with Brother Malik, Pedram, Fareena, Emily, Dean, and ­others about my own evangelical background and adult agnosticism. I had prayed with them at dhikrs and at the mosque as Rauf instructed me to, sometimes moved to tears by the beauty of the ceremonies and the awe that overwhelmed me at the possibility of a benevolent—though distant, in my opinion—deity. I reminded them, sometimes obsessively, that I had not “taken the shahada” and thus was not a Muslim. In their interpretation, however, all

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people are born Muslims—some are just raised to believe other things. Additionally, because I spoke Arabic with some competence after studying it for several years, believed Jesus to be a moral teacher but not divine, and had spent many summers traveling in North Africa and the Middle East, I seemed more like a Muslim than a Christian to them and they thought my ultimate, formal conversion not unlikely. I was, in short, a fellow traveler in their eyes and a member of their community, one they were not pleased to be losing. Although the assistant imams believed that Rauf had not meant to exclude me from their intimate dhikr services, I interpreted his instructions differently. Not only had I witnessed rather private disruptions in the community in 2007, I had continually remained noncommittal in my opinion of Rauf and of the work of the ASMA Society and Cordoba Initiative. Rauf and Khan were accustomed to the presence of interviewers—generally, members of the news media whose reports aired within hours or days—and other visitors at jum‘ah, dhikr, and ASMA and Cordoba events. But having a researcher observe their community for years without comment and without converting was another thing entirely. Fearing that attending dhikr with Rauf ’s dervishes but without Rauf ’s approval would compromise his relationships with them and their relationships with their shaykh, I insisted on abstaining from the meetings. Naively, I did not realize that my absence from the community could be as disruptive as my presence. While the assistant imams interpreted Rauf ’s instructions generously—at least, where I was concerned—others directly questioned them. My first experience with such questioning came from a source I did not expect: Fareena, with whom I had been particularly close. Before moving to Singapore, where she would be just a short flight from Rauf ’s Malaysian headquarters, Fareena admitted to me some of her frustrations with the changes that had occurred in the tariqa. She did not mind working hard to build the community, and she had never visited other Sufi orders, so the exclusive commitment to Rauf did not bother her. What she did object to was not being allowed to have members of other religious traditions—me, in particular—at dhikr. “If we’re really American Muslims and really all on the same path [as other Americans], what difference does it make who attends?” she asked rhetorically, reiterating Rauf ’s arguments about American Abrahamic commonality. “We should be reaching out to everyone.” The next year, on a phone call from Singapore, Fareena reminded me that I was still part of her community, even though we no longer lived in the same country.



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The mosque and dhikr group continued to operate much as it had for the next few years, with several dervishes increasing their volunteer service to the community as Rauf had instructed—and, in so doing, learning how to lead and manage a community without him—but the respite from major disruptions was brief. The responses by Rauf and Khan to controversy over the Cordoba House community center project caused more dervishes to question Rauf ’s decisions. Initially, those who questioned him were seeking not to second-guess their shaykh but to restore the understandings they had derived from his teachings. Aspects of his instructions seemed contradictory, and they sought to resolve the inconsistencies. Such was the case with the dervishes who financially supported the Islamic community center project. These members of Rauf ’s tariqa embraced his arguments that Muslims are just as American as members of any other religion. Thus, when controversy arose in 2010 over their new mosque and community center project, and Rauf considered changing it from an Islamic establishment into an interreligious one, they resisted. Muslims should not have to prove their patriotism any more than other Americans, they reasoned, interpreting Rauf ’s continual refrain about Abrahamic Americanness in light of their current circumstances. For them, questioning Rauf ’s return to an emphasis on interreligious partnerships was meant not to usurp his authority but to defend what they believed was their collective mission. By 2010, though, it became clear that Rauf and the dervishes involved in the Islamic center project had different ideas about its purpose—ones they were ultimately unable to overcome.

7 IS LAM I N THE AGE OF OB A MA What’s More American Than Service?

O N D E C E M B E R 2 1, 2 0 0 9 ,

when many Americans were preoccupied with holiday travel, shopping, or cooking, Daisy Khan appeared on the Fox News network’s conservative talk show, The O’Reilly Factor. With Bill O’Reilly off that day, guest host Laura Ingraham interviewed Khan about a new project she and Rauf, operating under the Cordoba Initiative, had invested in with a few of their associates, dervishes who owned the real estate firm Soho Properties. Proposed as a community center and worship space on Park Place in Lower Manhattan, Cordoba House would offer educational, cultural, and recreational services while providing Muslims a much-needed mosque; it would also be a place where members of various religious communities could interact. “It’s really to provide a place of peace, a place of services and solutions for the community, which is always looking for interfaith dialogue,” Soho Properties Chairman and CEO Sharif El-Gamal told the New York Times, which had run a front-page story about the project two weeks before.1 Indeed, part of the property already served as an overflow worship space for Masjid al-Farah, ten blocks away. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” ­Ingraham said to Khan. “I like what you’re trying to do.”2 While Ingraham’s response contrasts strikingly with the opposition to Cordoba House regularly featured on Fox News during the summer of 2010, the Cordoba House proposal did not seem to be a likely source of controversy at the time of Ingraham’s interview. In their coverage of the project a few weeks prior, New York Times writers had identified Rauf as a Sufi who preaches tolerance

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and is more concerned with “spiritual wisdom” than “strict ritual.”3 Additionally, they noted the approval the project had already garnered from a prominent New York rabbi, the executive director of the Jewish Community Center (which was to serve as a model for the project), the former general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum board (on which Daisy Khan served as an advisory member). It was not until May 2010—six months after Ingraham’s interview and several days after Khan, Rauf, and El-Gamal received approval from Manhattan’s Community Board 1 to proceed—that controversy erupted over what the New York Post (like Fox News, owned by Republican media mogul Rupert Murdoch) labeled the “Ground Zero Mosque.”4 El-Gamal later acknowledged that he, Khan, and Rauf—not imagining that a new mosque in an area previously populated with them would draw resistance—had erred by not seeking greater community feedback prior to undertaking the project. Rauf had informed Mayor Michael Bloomberg of their plans as early as September 2009 and received tacit approval, but no one had convened a meeting to seek the opinion of 9/11 families (those who lost loved ones) or first responders who had survived the attacks.5 It should be noted that El-Gamal was among the civilian responders who rushed to the burning buildings on 9/11. He stayed there, handing out water to firefighters, for two days, and nearly lost a dear friend when one of the towers collapsed.6 But families of 9/11 victims and first responders were not the primary opponents of Cordoba House. One firefighter did oppose Cordoba House’s bid to get taxpayer funding for community services from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, an entity established by Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to coordinate redevelopment after 9/11.7 By July 2010, however, the September 11th Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow organization gave its approval to the project.8 The most significant opposition to Cordoba House then and later came from conservative Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich and those associated with the Tea Party movement. Republican politicians had actively misled American voters in the months before the 2008 election by arguing or implying that Barack Obama was a Muslim—a tactic that caused Republican former Secretary of State Colin Powell to denounce many of his colleagues, but also an accusation that, as of 2010, almost 25 percent of Americans still believed.9 They sought to employ similar anti-Muslim campaign tricks again in 2010, during which the website of the National Republican Trust, a political action committee established in 2008 for the purpose of



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“defeating liberals, Progressives, and Democrats,”10 claimed that the community center was intended as a “shrine to the 9/11 terrorists.”11 In so doing, these politicians helped create the climate of fear and aggression that surrounded discussion of Cordoba House.12 And yet even they came late to the controversy. Conservative politicians did not seek to turn the community center into a campaign issue until members of a right-wing organization called Stop Islamicization of America (SIOA) created a controversy out of the local municipal matter. (SIOA has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center; it was an important source of inspiration for Norwegian white supremacist terrorist Anders Brevik’s massacre of 69 children at a summer camp in 2011.13) One of SIOA’s associates, Pamela Geller—a woman who had erroneously claimed during the 2008 election cycle that Obama was secretly the child of Malcolm X14—denounced the project on her blog after the initial Times report in 2009 but began to organize protests against the community center only in May 2010. At that point, conservative politicians, some still seeking to capitalize on the racist backlash that had greeted the nation’s first black (and in the minds of many, first Muslim) president, saw an opportunity they had nearly missed. Tea Party leader Mark Williams made his now infamous comment about the center being a shrine to the 9/11 terrorists’ “monkey god” in May 2010.15 Gingrich, who was contemplating a 2012 presidential bid funded primarily by conservative casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson—who argues that all Muslims want to kill all Jews; who advocated dropping a nuclear bomb on Tehran; and who spends millions trying to sway US policy in favor of right-wing Israeli politics16—began to criticize the Cordoba House project soon after. Aspiring politicians seeking local office followed suit, as did New York Republican Congressman Peter King, who not only questioned Rauf ’s credentials as a “moderate” but also launched Congressional hearings on Muslim radicalization in the United States—despite the fact that Homeland Security analysts insisted that white right-wing militant groups, not Muslims, posed the greatest terrorist threat to Americans.17 Rauf received increased criticism over the summer as news outlets discovered old comments he had made chastising US leaders for supporting dictators in the Middle East. It seemed not to matter that former President George W. Bush did the same thing in 2003.18 Seeking to appease his critics and to prove his moderation once again, as he had during the early days of the Cordoba Initiative, Rauf emphasized his organization’s connections to respectable leaders of other religious traditions. He was hardly alone in this: several national

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Muslim organizations also urged interreligious engagement and dialogue during the controversy, which spread to towns and cities across the country where Muslims sought to build Islamic centers or simply establish mosques.19 For Rauf, however, this return to interreligious alliances also meant turning the Cordoba House project from a mosque and Islamic community center into a multifaith institution. While this possibility seemed to pacify some critics, it was not one that Rauf ’s dervishes could accept. In response to the controversy, El-Gamal—who had purchased 51 Park Place in 2006—suggested renaming the project and restructuring its leadership team. In July 2010, the “Cordoba House” name was transferred to a smaller entity, led by Rauf, that would oversee interreligious programming within the larger community center, which would be named after its street address: Park51. Rauf and El-Gamal would serve as joint project managers only until Park51—which El-Gamal created as a new corporation separate from ASMA and Cordoba—could file for tax-exempt status, appoint a permanent executive director, and fill twenty-three seats on the organization’s interreligious board of directors.20 These actions failed to stifle the fires continually stoked by Fox News pundits and conservative politicians. Although both Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama argued in the following months that the project’s developers had the legal right to build a mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero, then-Governor David Patterson, among others, suggested using eminent domain to force them to relocate.21 Daisy Khan, who often served as the public face of the project and spoke for Rauf while he was away on a US State Department tour of the Middle East, indicated she was amenable to moving the center. El-Gamal, however, who had long followed Rauf in believing that Muslim Americans are ideal citizens and equal to any others, felt that moving the center or changing its nature would violate the mission he and his shaykh had long imagined of serving their community and proving their patriotism. As I discuss below, disagreements over purpose, leadership, and fundraising tactics between Rauf and Khan, on one side, and El-Gamal, on the other, continued after the summer’s end. These differences ultimately led El-Gamal and other dervishes involved in the project—some of whom began to refer to Rauf during the summer as the “occulted imam,” a barb derived from the phrase used to describe revered Shi‘i imams who had disappeared22—to disaffiliate from Rauf and Khan by 2011. In January of that year, El-Gamal announced that Rauf and Khan would no longer fundraise for or speak on behalf of the project,



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although Rauf would remain on the board of directors.23 After that, a series of visiting speakers filled the minbar at the temporary mosque. Despite Khan’s and Rauf ’s disagreements with El-Gamal and their different visions for the project, all agreed on one thing: that the community center would be not simply a worship space or a Muslim-only institution but a place of service for all New Yorkers. This emphasis on service was entirely sincere. On different occasions, I had heard various dervishes speak excitedly about what the center could bring to the residents of Lower Manhattan and how, if built properly, it could be an example of everything from environmentally sustainable engineering to proper social engagement. At the same time, the stress on service was also strategic. Rauf, Khan, and El-Gamal spoke of service both because they and other dervishes hoped to contribute to their community and because service was an increasingly popular way for Muslim Americans to emphasize their moderation. “What’s more American than serving others?” El-Gamal asked when defending Park51 that summer.24 In the years after the controversy, Rauf and Khan also continued to emphasize service at times, even though they had stepped away from Park51 and had “moved on,” as Rauf put it, to other projects.25 In what follows, I examine the fate of Park51 and of the organizations Rauf and Khan led after the 2010 controversy. I focus on the ways different visions of service exacerbated the growing rift between Rauf and his dervishes and cost the community center valuable support from Muslim groups who had long questioned why Rauf and Khan tended to build relations with leaders of other religions more than with fellow Muslims. To place these debates in context, I briefly discuss American Muslims’ efforts to make service proof of moderation, efforts that are modeled on the community service endeavors other religious minorities had engaged in during the twentieth century (often in cooperation with the federal government) while trying to gain acceptance in the United States. Although Rauf had promoted this means of assimilating as early as 2004, he had not actively participated in organized community service endeavors. Rather, unlike other Sufis—such as Tosun Bayrak, who led his dervishes in projects ranging from refugee relief in war-torn countries to disaster relief in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,26 and Faiz Khan, who joined the Sufi Circle of Long Island and participated in their community service endeavors after disaffiliating from ASMA27—Rauf chose to act in the service of the government in more overtly political capacities. As we shall see, this first foray into providing direct community service would bring with it a lesson in the politics of

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intercommunal dynamics and show how engagement in service was not a guarantee of acceptance. Faced with the limits of inclusion for Muslims in America at that point, it is perhaps not surprising, as I discuss below, that Rauf returned to emphasizing Sufism as much as he did service and interreligious alliances.

In the Service of the State During the his first year as president, Barack Obama traveled to Egypt to deliver a formal address to “Muslim communities around the world.”28 In addition to promising better relations with Muslims abroad, Obama pledged to protect Muslims’ practices at home. Faith should “bring us together,” he argued. For that reason, his administration was “forging service projects” to unite “Christians, Muslims, and Jews.” As an example of the kind of freedom and tolerance he hoped to encourage, he pointed to the medieval Spanish city of Cordoba. While using service projects as a way to unify diverse religious groups was not new, as I have elsewhere discussed with regards to Presidents Wilson, ­Roosevelt, and Kennedy,29 Obama was participating in a rather recent version of this trend. Shortly after taking office in 2009, he established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to replace George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, created in 2001 to facilitate “compassionate conservatism,” replacing “government bureaucracy” with “neighbors serving neighbors.”30 Unlike early twentieth-century presidents, Bush’s policy—which expanded the “charitable choice” legislation of his predecessor, Bill Clinton31—allowed the government to grant funds to religious organizations providing services ranging from childcare to addiction counseling, thus reducing the need for government agencies to provide such things. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bush also issued an executive order to create a new Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives within the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency Kennedy had created in 1961 to counter communist influences abroad by furthering “­America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets,”32 and that contracted with religious service providers after Kennedy’s Peace Corps, dogged by accusations that it would allow Catholics to control the government, could not.33 Among other things, Bush’s changes to USAID nearly doubled the amount of foreign aid going to religious service providers. Notably, 98 percent of these funds went to Christian groups (primarily Catholic and evangelical organizations), while the remaining 2 percent of funds were divided between



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two Jewish and two Muslim organizations.34 It is not insignificant that the full public inclusion of Catholic service organizations in the US government’s operations occurred not during the twentieth-century fight against godless communism, but as US officials increasingly focused on a new religious enemy: “radical” Muslims.35 Obama retained Bush’s and Clinton’s strategy of partnering with religious organizations to achieve government ends but sought to make such partnerships more inclusive. In addition to altering the name of Bush’s agency, Obama added a new advisory board to which he appointed Eboo Patel, the Muslim American founder of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) community service organization and one of Rauf ’s and Khan’s first young Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow.36 Then, just after returning from Egypt, Obama announced the creation of United We Serve, an agency designed to “make volunteerism and community service part of the daily lives of all Americans.” Unveiling this national service initiative in the wake of the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression, Obama emphasized the need for volunteer labor to turn the nation’s fiscal tide. “Economic recovery is as much about what you’re doing in your communities as what we’re doing in Washington,” he explained.37 In the months following, Obama commended Muslim Americans who responded to his challenge. “Faith-based organizations, including Islamic organizations, have been at the forefront in participating in this summer of service,” he said during Ramadan in 2009.38 Meanwhile, a group of Muslim Americans established an organization and website, MuslimServe.org, to connect visitors to the administration’s online initiative (Serve.gov), thus allowing them to participate in federal efforts directly and to register their own community service projects in the federal database. In the “Message to Muslim American Community” [sic] posted on the site, MuslimServe organizers explained their purpose. “United We Serve is an opportunity for every Muslim American to be part of a nationwide movement to bring about positive change,” they argued. In addition to helping rebuild communities after the economic crisis, they elaborated, “‘Answer the Call’ means most importantly, to answer God’s call to serve humanity.” The leaders of established Muslim American organizations followed suit over the next few years. In 2009, for example, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) encouraged Muslim Americans to participate in the first ever National Day of Service, designated for September 11, 2009, and to be observed every year thereafter on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks.39 Likewise, during the Cordoba House controversy in 2010, fifteen Muslim American

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l­ eaders and organizations—including the three largest North American organizations: ISNA, ICNA, and CAIR—encouraged Muslims across the United States to join MuslimServe’s effort and use the federal website to search for projects in their areas. The goal, according to their “Call to Action,” was “to turn the tide of hatred” and “demonstrate our core Islamic values and our dedication to our neighborhoods and our country.”40 Well aware that they were regarded with suspicion, MuslimServe leaders reminded participants, “all eyes will be on us this Eid and on 9/11 . . . Let’s show that we can rise above prejudice and hatred and be the kind of conscientious citizens who give back to our country.” For its part, ISNA even designated the theme of its 2010 annual convention “Nurturing Compassionate Communities: Connecting Faith and Service.” The service projects Muslim American leaders promoted were wide ranging, from participation in government organizations listed on the Serve.gov website to local efforts to fight urban blight, build housing, and feed the homeless. In addition to serving humanity, these initiatives were designed to showcase the patriotism, moderation, and community-mindedness of American Muslims. When, in the midst of these growing campaigns, the Islamic community center’s leaders began describing their project as service-oriented, other New York Muslims took notice. Unfortunately, many of the services Khan, Rauf, and El-Gamal promised to provide seemed designed for wealthy New Yorkers rather than those still struggling economically. In July 2010, for example, the Cordoba Initiative, then still the primary tax-exempt entity behind the community center, explained on its website that the center would house “a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, art exhibition spaces, bookstores, restaurants,” and other “services” that would create a “cultural nexus” in the region.41 This description of the project combined the cultural and educational programming that ASMA and Cordoba had once emphasized with the recreational focus of other city institutions like the Upper West Side Jewish Community Center, where El-Gamal’s children had learned to swim. Not only were such programs ones Khan, Rauf, and El-Gamal had experience with, they were ones the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), with a budget of two billion dollars, sought to fund. As El-Gamal explained to an interviewer in late July, after describing the center’s proposed yoga studio, “Residents need services, investment in the neighborhood, activities and opportunities. Community Board 1, which represents the residents of Lower Manhattan, acknowledged the needs we were fulfilling when they gave us their clear support . . . The Board recognized the value in jobs, programs and



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services we are bringing to the city, and they know that this project is very important for Lower Manhattan.”42 The controversy intensified over the next few months, in part because of the defenses Rauf, Khan, and El-Gamal mounted. In addition to non-Muslims who opposed what they erroneously believed would be a thirteen-story mosque near Ground Zero—a misconception that prompted El-Gamal to create a new nonprofit called Prayer Space, with a separate board of directors, to oversee the one-story mosque in the adjoining ­building—some Muslims criticized what they considered to be the “elitist” services on offer.43 It took some time for Rauf, Khan, and El-Gamal to recognize and respond to the latter complaint. In the meantime, their public pronouncements tended to make the situation worse. Writing an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News in early August, for example, El-Gamal described the community center as “a world-class house of culture and art, education and recreation . . . A facility where you can find children’s swim classes, photography exhibitions, Pilates sessions, Spanish-­ language lessons and an amazing gym.”44 Khan portrayed the project in similar terms in a television appearance later that month. Further, she and El-Gamal reinforced the concerns other Muslim American leaders had when noting that Park51’s directors would work “closely with interfaith leaders, elected representatives, community organizations and our neighbors across the city.”45 The constituency missing from that list, of course, was other Muslim Americans. Later that month, Hussein Rashid—a young Muslim scholar who had grown up in New York and once participated in Rauf ’s and Khan’s Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow program—gave voice to the growing concerns among New York Muslims about the project. In a post on a popular online religion news magazine, he (like many other Muslims) chided the developers for not anticipating the “Islamophobia” such a project could stoke and for putting Muslim Americans in the position of wanting to defend the center on principle but hesitating because the project did not seem designed to serve or represent most of them. Rauf “may be one of the ‘good’ Muslims, but no one person should be the lynchpin of a project this size,” Rashid argued. “It should be easy in New York City to create a visibly diverse group of Muslim supporters that represents the richness of our community, and who can put forward a clearly articulated vision.”46 Rashid was not the only one to question the leadership and services Rauf, Khan, and El-Gamal planned to offer. In fact, reservations about these issues led many Muslim leaders to refrain from supporting the center until well after the height of the controversy.

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The uproar reached a peak in September. On September 10, I attended Friday prayers at Park51 after an early Eid al-Fitr lunch at Masjid al-Farah to celebrate the end of Ramadan. The striped carpet of the temporary mosque filled slowly with worshippers who were more reserved than they usually would be on what is normally a day of celebration. Before the service started, El-Gamal realized the batteries in the speaker’s microphone had died, and I wandered out to a nearby drugstore to find replacements. The streets were busy only with the Financial District’s usual traffic, and I saw no protesters, just police stationed outside the mosque to deter any assailants. El-Gamal’s brother delivered the khutbah that afternoon and at the end asked worshippers to return the next day, September 11, when mass demonstrations were planned in front of the property by both opponents and supporters. He especially hoped worshippers would attend an evening candlelight vigil in remembrance of the victims of the 2001 attacks.47 Thousands of demonstrators did fill the streets around Park51 the next day. Some wore t-shirts bearing the message “No Sharia in America.” Making reference to a Florida pastor who threatened to build a Qur’an-fed bonfire unless the center relocated, defenders of the project countered with signs that read, “Real Americans Don’t Burn Qur’ans.”48 While many religious leaders in New York and the leader of the New York Civil Liberties Union also defended Park51, most local Muslim leaders remained silent.49 A week and a half later, El-Gamal attended a day-long meeting convened by the Majlis Ash-Shura (Islamic Leadership Council) of New York, an organization representing fifty-five mosques and Muslim groups. El-Gamal apologized to local leaders and visiting representatives of other national groups, including ICNA, CAIR, and the Muslim American Society, for not consulting them earlier.50 He then promised that the center would not just cater to “Manhattan elites” involved in interfaith dialogue or to those who could afford dues for the gym and pool. El-Gamal also pledged to include representatives of various Muslim groups (including black Americans) on an advisory committee and on Park51’s board of trustees. The meeting allayed the fears of many, including Aisha al-Adawiya, the founder of Women in Islam and a member of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA) community service organization. In response to al-Adawiya’s insistence that the center’s services be available to poor New Yorkers, El-Gamal promised that it would be “open and inviting” to everyone.51 During a postmeeting press conference, the assembled leaders bestowed their blessing on the project and on El-Gamal’s vision for the ­center— one from which, by that point, Rauf had already diverged.



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Rauf and Khan had talked about creating an independent Islamic center and mosque since I first met them. As Khan had explained when I interviewed her in 2008, describing ASMA’s work then by emphasizing the Cordoba House project and cultural and educational programs instead of Sufism, they were hoping to create an institution that would “have an American cultural expression to it” while being “very authentically Islamic in terms of its practice.” ­Although she was adamant that it should be “very inviting to non-Muslims and there would be interfaith dialogue,” it was not something she or Rauf envisioned then as an interreligious institution. In fact, 2008 was the year Rauf, feeling secure in his moderate status, restructured the Cordoba Initiative and removed any mention of interreligious leadership from its website. The defining feature of the institution they then hoped to create was that it would be—as a Muslim-led institution—“more an American Muslim center than a Muslim center built around a certain ethnicity.”52 When Rauf—his moderation now in question—returned to emphasizing interreligious alliances in 2010, it was not solely a tactical decision. Unlike ­El-Gamal, who insisted that Park51 was meant to serve the local community and had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks, Rauf had begun to envision Cordoba House as a place of international, interreligious healing that would serve to bring people from different religious and national communities together after the tragedy of 9/11. Its location just blocks from Ground Zero was not incidental, to him, but meaningful: the service Cordoba House could provide would be to testify, through its existence as an interreligious center, to the triumph of moderation over terrorism. Rauf had hinted at his larger goals for Cordoba House as early as 2009, when speaking about the location’s significance to the New York Times.53 Yet it was not until the latter half of 2010 that he insisted on Cordoba House’s interreligious character. When El-Gamal subsequently barred Rauf and Khan from speaking on behalf of the project or fundraising for it, he attributed it partly to this difference. “Imam Feisal’s vision has a global scope and his ideals for the Cordoba movement are truly exceptional,” El-Gamal began, but “our community in Lower Manhattan is local . . . Our focus is and must remain the residents of Lower Manhattan and the Muslim American community in the greater New York area.”54 By 2011, this disagreement over the scope of Cordoba House services acquired very material ramifications. To allay the fears of New Yorkers who did not want their taxes used (through distribution by the LMDC) to build a mosque or any other Islamic

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institution, El-Gamal repeated steps that many other marginalized religious service organizations had previously taken when criticism impeded their attempts to prove their national loyalties through service: he created an independent organization that could qualify for funds in the court of public opinion.55 (Legally, this was unnecessary; numerous religious service organizations and community centers already received federal funding thanks to the Clinton- and Bush-era legislation mentioned earlier.) By November of 2010, when El-Gamal applied for funds from the LMDC, Park51 represented only the community center, Prayer Space ran the mosque, and Cordoba House (Rauf ’s independent organization with Khan) would direct interreligious programming for the project.56 Yet, because Park51 had yet to acquire nonprofit status from the Internal Revenue Service—which failed to process its application for over six months, despite repeated requests to expedite it57— it was ineligible to receive LMDC grants for that round of disbursements or to collect charitable donations. Contrary to everyone’s expectations the year before, the community center increasingly looked as though it might not find the funds it needed. In the meantime, Rauf and Khan continued to speak about and collect contributions for Cordoba House and for a new project they began to call the “Cordoba Movement.” Few people realized that these donations were going not to the community center but to the nonprofit Cordoba Initiative. Instead of serving their shaykh in pursuit of a joint mission, as El-Gamal and other dervishes believed they had been in the past, or even working together as business partners to serve the community, Rauf and El-Gamal, along with their respective supporters, were increasingly at odds in contests for funding—a situation about to worsen measurably as President Obama, and then Congress, insisted on cutting funds for community service providers in the years that followed.58 Trying to diplomatically distance Cordoba House from the actual community center, El-Gamal ended up clarifying what had become the real nature of his relationship with Rauf: competitor rather than colleague in the push to define (and finance) different versions of American Muslim moderation. In February 2011, while on a speaking tour in upstate New York, Rauf told editors of the Buffalo News that he would move Cordoba House (something reporters still mistook for the center as a whole) to another location if offered a facility to house it. The announcement prompted El-Gamal to assert the independence of his project again: “Park51 is not moving its location under any circumstances,” he told the New York Times. “Imam Feisal has no authority or control over this project, over its board of directors or over Soho Properties,



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which controls the real estate. Park51, the Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan, is more than any one personality or imam.” As El-Gamal distanced Park51 from Rauf, Khan, ASMA, and Cordoba, however, Rauf and Khan continued to claim the community center vision for themselves. That March, speaking at a luncheon held by a women’s magazine, Khan announced a new project she and Rauf were planning for an interfaith cultural center that would be larger in scope than Park51. “We had the vision, we still have the dream,” Khan told the audience.“The location is not the dream, my friend.”59 Although El-Gamal maintained publically during the following year that he and others at Soho Properties were open to reconciling with Khan and Rauf, a rapprochement never took place. Instead, Rauf and Khan devoted themselves for a time to the “new vision” of which Khan had spoken, while Park51’s leaders hosted occasional cultural programs in their temporary space and sought funds to make preliminary improvements to the building. Not only did their different visions, competition for funding, and eventual public falling out diminish both parties’ prospects for raising money and contribute to the original community center’s demise, as I discuss below, they provided a reminder of some of the ­trials that religious minorities, including Muslim Americans, had encountered in the past when trying to prove their patriotism and moderation through ­service. These lessons were ones that other national Muslim leaders would also learn in the years that followed—painfully, and with a growing awareness that the integration of other racial and religious minorities had not been as seamless or even as encompassing as they had once thought. Before turning to those broader developments among Muslim Americans, I take a final look at the organizations Rauf and Khan led and at the Islamic community center project, and I show how those involved tried to remake themselves, once again, as moderate Muslim spokespersons. When it turned out that renewed professions of service and participation in interreligious coalitions was not enough to establish Rauf, Khan, or El-Gamal as widely accepted moderates, all returned to where they had begun: emphasizing Sufism.

Recasting Cordoba and the Community Center and Returning to Sufism Just as 9/11 had caused Rauf and Khan to recast their work with ASMA in major ways, so, too, did the 2010 controversy inspire them to reframe the work of both ASMA and Cordoba. Some of this revision took place i­mmediately—a  new

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­ ordoba website and statement of purpose, for example, that Rauf unveiled C during the height of the Islamic center controversy—while other changes in the organizations became apparent only years later, hinted at in the book Rauf published in 2012 to defend his version of moderation and promote his organizations, as well as in the monthly newsletters and press releases ASMA and Cordoba distributed to those on their email lists. The initial response by Rauf and Khan to the controversy was, as Khan suggested in March of 2011, to undertake an even larger project—the Cordoba Movement—meant to build an interreligious coalition of moderates around the globe. In a letter to visitors posted on the new website, Rauf explained that the Cordoba Movement was initially founded as the Cordoba Initiative but grew into “a multi-national, multi-faith organization dedicated to improving understanding and building trust among people of all cultures and faith traditions”—in other words, no longer just among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, or between “Islam and the West.”60 Furthermore, the Cordoba Movement was “broadening” its previous programs. Describing many older ASMA and Cordoba programs in the religiously neutral language of community development, Rauf explained that the Cordoba Movement would focus on Young Leaders (formerly Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow) and Women’s Empowerment (formerly the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality), in addition to creating multifaith alliances. Rauf also announced that he would undertake an extended speaking tour to promote the movement—the fundraising tour that ultimately caused a rift with El-Gamal. While Rauf and Khan did, in fact, spend the first half of 2011 promoting the Cordoba Movement, their public falling out with El-Gamal slowed the new program’s momentum. Within a year Rauf returned to his work on improving US-Muslim relations. He and Khan folded the Cordoba Movement, including most of its website content (live for just one year), back into the existing Cordoba Initiative structure, and Khan continued her work with ASMA, focusing mostly on the WISE program that required so much of her time and garnered so much funding. During this time, they still spoke of creating a global network of moderates and of creating an interfaith community center, as Rauf described in his 2012 book, Moving the Mountain: Beyond Ground Zero to a New Vision of Islam in America, but they did so as part of their larger work addressing issues pertinent to Muslims. Rauf ’s 2012 book bore a great deal of resemblance to What’s Right with Islam, the book he had written in 2004. In fact, when pressed in May of that year by New



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York radio talk-show host Brian Lehrer to explain what was new about his newest vision, Rauf had a hard time doing so. Instead, he reiterated the arguments he had developed nearly a decade earlier: that Muslims in the United States, “first generation immigrants coming here with many of their cultural trappings . . . need to transform themselves in the American cultural context” so as to serve as a bridge between the United States and Muslims in the rest of the world. The transformation should not be a difficult one, he elaborated, because just as US laws embody Judeo-Christian principles, the “American law, American Declaration of Independence, American social contract, [and] American principles of democracy express our shari‘ah principles of good governance in the most effective way. And right now I’m actually involved in a conference of Muslim scholars . . . seeking to establish principles of good government in keeping with Islamic law” in countries around the world. “My argument is that the Americans,” from the arrangement established between religion and politics to the large-scale provision of “social services for the poor,” have done this.61 Significantly, in addition to promoting Islam “in an American vernacular,” he explained to National Public Radio’s Terry Gross that same month, he was recommitting to promoting “the spiritual dimension of Islam, which is called Sufism.”62 Listening to Rauf discuss his new book—which, like his previous one, was divided between defenses of Islam and descriptions of his and Khan’s major projects—one might well wonder, as Lehrer did, what had changed for the imam after 2010. Although Rauf stumbled over the interview question, his 2012 book does contain new content, much more on women’s rights, for example, than his 2004 book had. Yet it is most notable not for the things it includes but for the things it omits—among them, any mention of democratic capitalism. By 2012, the first year since 2007 that the US economy did not worsen, promoting American-style capitalism was not a promising strategy for gaining acceptance. Just the year before, with corporate profits reaching new heights while most wages and standards of living failed to improve, the Occupy Wall Street movement begun in New York spread nationwide, railing against the very corporations that Rauf had lauded in his 2004 book. Public anger over American economic inequalities was so great that by 2015 it would even fuel the surprising rise of a socialist candidate for the presidency—something that seemed impossible when Rauf attempted to follow the path to assimilation paved by Michael Novak and other second-generation white ethnics who had worked at the American Enterprise Institute in the 1970s, or even when Obama, who was himself accused of being a socialist nearly as often as he was accused

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of being a Muslim by politicians who feared he would tax whites to support blacks,63 first ran for president in 2008. Instead of praising democratic capitalism in 2012, Rauf acknowledged America’s failure to resolve “persistent poverty and economic inequality.”64 While this change in perspective was undoubtedly due more to the global economic climate than to the Islamic center controversy, other aspects of his new argument—such as his decision to refrain from touting America’s ostensible racial equality as frequently as he had in 2004—had more to do with the lessons he learned during the summer of 2010. Still optimistic about racial integration,65 Rauf openly acknowledged for the first time in print that racism is institutionalized on a systemic level in the United States, including in the mass incarceration of black Americans.66 He and Khan were still not as critical of American racial injustices as other national Muslim leaders. For example, Khan largely defended New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly during controversy over his department’s use of Stop-and-Frisk tactics—a method of policing blacks and Latinos that a federal judge found in violation of constitutional projections against unreasonable search and seizure—as well as during controversy over the NYPD’s ­decades-long secret (and warrantless) surveillance of Muslims in New York and New Jersey.67 Further, neither ASMA nor Cordoba commented on the routine murders of unarmed black men and boys at the hands of police that bystanders caught on camera in cities across the country from 2014 to 2016, whereas ISNA and ICNA issued press releases condemning some of these incidents and urging justice and accountability.68 Nevertheless, the animosity they and many other Muslim American communities and individuals faced in 2010 and after awakened them to the depth of violent racism that exists in America. When, in the wake of the Ground Zero Mosque debacle, a white gunman killed six Sikh worshippers, whom he had confused with Muslims,69 at a temple in Wisconsin in 2012, ASMA sent representatives to a memorial vigil. Cordoba did the same when a white supremacist terrorist gunned down nine black worshippers during a Wednesday night Bible study at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.70 These gestures undoubtedly helped ASMA and ­Cordoba emphasize their arguments that moderates of all religions need to ally against such extremists. Still, Khan and Rauf had not seen the need to make such gestures prior to 2010. The last major difference between the vision Rauf elucidated in his 2004 book and the one he detailed in 2012 is that, while Rauf attempted to



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­ umanize so-called fundamentalists in 2004, describing them as distraught h and disenfranchised people acting out of defensive instincts when they believed themselves threatened, he no longer attempted to mitigate the aversion Americans had toward extremists of any kind. Rather, after the Islamic center controversy, he tended to describe such extremists with the same language employed by the proponents of secularism whom he had once argued against: as those who promote the “intrusion of Islam” into politics.71 This change of perspective is somewhat ironic, given that Rauf rails against secularism and atheistic communism in other portions of the book and blames Soviet secularist attempts at neocolonialism in the Middle East for the reactionary “rise of extremist Muslim fundamentalism.”72 More importantly, it is a change reminiscent of the dynamics members of other religious minority groups have undergone when attempting to prove their patriotism by participating in programs allied with or sponsored by the federal government. Engaging in these pursuits with their own objectives in mind, such representatives often find their activities molded and repurposed in ways they might not originally have intended.73 Rauf ’s 2004 arguments about Muslim moderation differed from those of secularists who insisted on the need to separate religion and politics. By 2012, after nearly a decade of participating in State Department Programs, his arguments had begun to more closely resemble some of those secularist positions, raising the question of whether (as scholars of Islam and secularism have warned) his objectives would eventually come to replicate the State Department’s agenda.74 Rauf ’s change in tone from 2004 to 2012 cannot be explained solely by strategic considerations or by the pressure exerted by the government programs in which he had participated. Rather, for Rauf in 2012, “extremists” now included ones who, seeking to defend the ostensible Christian identity of the United States, had threatened his own life, as well as the lives of many other Muslim Americans. In response to these experiences, Rauf redoubled his focus on getting moderates of all religions to band together to fight all fundamentalists. Distancing himself even further from the specter of extremism, Rauf began emphasizing Sufism again. It became apparent during the 2010 controversy that Sufism remained an important index of Muslim moderation for many Americans, and—after years of threats on their lives—Rauf and Khan did not want to be mistaken for extremists again. Novelist William Dalrymple, quoting the 2007 RAND Corporation study discussed in Chapter 4, told New York Times readers in August 2010 that Sufis

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are allies against radicals worldwide and “ideal ‘partners in the effort to combat Islamic extremism.’” They are the “Muslims in the middle,” he claimed— caught between uninformed Americans who view all Muslims as potential terrorists, on the one hand, and Muslim extremists elsewhere who view “moderate, pluralistic Sufis” as legitimate targets of violence, on the other. While Rauf ’s “slightly New-Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra,” Dalrymple admitted, both average Americans and shapers of US foreign policy should embrace him.75 Liberal elites like Dalrymple were far from alone in seeing Rauf ’s Sufism as an indication of his moderation. A few days after Dalrymple’s column appeared in the Times, Brian Lehrer hosted a call-in segment on public radio for residents of the Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca, urging them to report their thoughts on the nearby mosque and proposed community center. The callers were overwhelmingly supportive and described Masjid al-Farah and Rauf as “dream neighbors.” One noted that Sufi Books, Shaykha Fariha’s since-closed store, had also been a neighborhood fixture for many years.76 A subsequent caller said he knew of Sufi Books and had not known that the same Muslims were behind the Islamic center but was now even more in favor of the project. Such favorable references to Rauf ’s Sufi identity did not dissuade conservative politicians from using the controversy for political gain. The following Monday, for example, New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio aired commercials—complete with smoldering footage from the World Trade Center attacks—in which he denounced Rauf as a terrorist. But neither did such favorable references escape the attention of Rauf and Khan. Rauf openly promoted Sufism again in his 2012 book and through Cordoba events, as did Khan, despite devoting so much time to her WISE work that she allowed ASMA’s Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow program to lapse. (A few years later, Khan would separate WISE from ASMA entirely and leave the latter organization). In May 2012, for example, Khan invited ASMA supporters to an evening of communing with mystics, including Rauf, at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan and of contemplating America’s special role in fostering interreligious cooperation. 77 In the years that followed, ASMA and Cordoba also sponsored the musical performances of Sufi Qawwali singer Farid Ayaz, who had been ASMA’s frequent guest during its more openly Sufi period. The Cordoba Initiative described these Sufi events as part of its new “Faith and Community Affairs” initiative.78 Additionally, Rauf began to deliver lectures on Sufism at local churches again and included announcements for them in his monthly newsletters.79



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Meanwhile, as El-Gamal and others at Soho Properties struggled with continued criticism of their endeavor and insufficient funds, they, too, emphasized Sufism and interreligious endeavors. By the summer of 2011, El-Gamal had recruited the family member of a 9/11 victim to Park51’s board of directors and had finally gained nonprofit status from the IRS, which allowed him to engage in a concerted fundraising campaign. Yet, El-Gamal acknowledged, Park51 still faced serious obstacles. Resigned to the possibility of reducing the project’s scale, El-Gamal told a New York Times reporter that if the local residents he met at planning meetings only wanted a four- or five-story community center, that is what it would be—eventually.80 He admitted that it would take several years before they could even raise the millions of dollars needed to begin work on the buildings that housed the mosque and community space. In the meantime, Park51’s promotional materials continued to describe a fifteen-story center. Among the proposed permanent exhibits was one on Sufism called The Bridge of Light: Rumi, America’s Best Selling Poet and a Voice for Interfaith.81 In September 2011, ten days after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks— a time when police officers prohibited foot or vehicular traffic on Park Place to all but residents, thus effectively preventing protests—Park51 held its grand opening. The feeling in the building that night was at turns solemn and celebratory. Several of Rauf ’s and Fariha’s dervishes—ones no longer involved in the Park51 project—attended the event and stood in quiet clusters around the cultural space and adjoining mosque, exchanging hugs and meaningful looks. Nothing seemed to have gone as planned with what even Park51’s leaders now described as the “interfaith community center,”82 but they mused that perhaps this was the beginning they had all been waiting for. One month later, Consolidated Edison—the utility giant then leasing part of the building to Soho Properties—filed suit against El-Gamal for nearly two million dollars in disputed back rent.83 Park51 continued to host cultural events, recreation classes, and Muslim holiday celebrations for the next few years, as New Yorkers and other Americans largely forgot about the center. But its directors could not overcome the funding difficulties they faced after their split with Rauf and Khan. In 2014, El-Gamal and the project’s other leaders decided to give up their dream of building an Islamic community center once and for all. Soho Properties announced they would turn the property into a condominium tower and move the temporary mosque housed there into what they hoped would one day be a three-story museum at 51 Park Place.84 The following year, after hiring a new interim director to reinvigorate the project, El-Gamal began

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a fundraising tour with Imam Siraj Wahhaj. The new museum and sanctuary would be focused not on contemporary political or social issues but on enduring theological truths, its new director promised, while the mosque (housed in a hotel conference room, as of early 2016) would remain nondenominational: Sufi-friendly but not Sufi-focused, a space where Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims could worship together. While it remains to be seen when the museum will materialize, Park51’s leaders have pledged that community members—Muslim and non-Muslim—will be continually involved in the process.85 It would be a mistake in the wake of the Islamic center controversy and subsequent anti-Muslim fervor to conclude that the efforts Rauf and Khan have made to increase acceptance of Muslims in the United States have failed. In fact, the tremendous support that Rauf, Khan, and Park51 garnered from elite Americans of all religious backgrounds during the controversy demonstrated the success of their efforts over the previous decade and the enduring resonance of narratives connecting Sufism, service, and free-market capitalism to moderation. Yet, as demonstrated by, among other things, a hostile rally outside a Phoenix Islamic center in May 2015, at which hundreds of protestors hoisted guns and signs that said “Fuck Islam,” even average, law-abiding Muslims face intimidation and violence in the United States and continue to live with the burden of proving their moderation—often to audiences already determined not to listen.86 In 2010, shaken by the controversy over the Islamic community center project and by the threats of violence that accompanied it, Daisy Khan asked rhetorically, “if we can’t build an interfaith community center, who can?”87 The question remains a valid one. If Muslim Americans who participate in government programs to foster American interests, who describe authentic Islam in terms of dominant American values, and who are so deeply cautious in their public pronouncements and political activity as Rauf and Khan still attract negative attention and criticism, what hope can “plain old American” Muslims (as Khan called them in our 2008 interview) have that they will ever win acceptance rather than suspicion? Such questions notwithstanding, other Muslim American leaders are increasingly placing their hopes in the power of community service to prove their moderation. They are not alone. Sikh Americans, often mistaken for Muslims, are also engaging in community service—in part, for the same reason. The New York-based Sikh Coalition, for example, organized a national Day of Seva (selfless community service) in August 2013 to commemorate the fatal shoot-



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ing at the Oak Creek Sikh Temple in Wisconsin the year before and invited other Americans to join the now-annual activity after a mentally ill Muslim American killed four marines at military facilities in Tennessee in 2015.88 But providing moderation and patriotism through community service is a complicated business. Not only do such efforts have the potential to exacerbate preexisting ethnic, economic, racial, and political differences among minoritized American populations—as Park51 threatened to do—they can also pose other potential problems for marginalized communities, including co-optation from the government, while still failing to gain them broader social acceptance. This is not to say, as I discuss in the Conclusion, that Muslim Americans or others should refrain from engaging in such service endeavors—far from it. Rather, it is to draw attention again to the pressures on Muslims to demonstrate their moderation in particular ways and to note the risks, as well as the hoped-for rewards, of trying to meet these demands in practice.

CO NCLUSI O N Community Service and the Limits of Inclusion

O N S AT U R D AY, A U G U S T 3 0 , 2 0 14 , Muslim Americans from across the nation boarded buses bound for some of Detroit’s blighted west-side neighborhoods as part of the “Community Service Program” of ISNA’s fifty-first annual convention. Despite having participated in MuslimServe’s effort to promote the September 11th National Day of Service among Muslim American communities in 2010, ISNA’s directors had only recently begun to encourage community service in non-Muslim neighborhoods. Between 2013 and 2014, for example, ISNA Development Foundation officials and Founder’s Committee members changed the description of their annual Community Service Recognition Luncheon. Whereas 2013 convention materials described it as an event where “the nation’s Muslim leaders, scholars, and government officials join to honor an individual dedicated to community service within the Muslim community,” the Annual Convention Program description of the 2014 luncheon—at which Jimmy Carter delivered the keynote—omitted that last clause, turning service into a broader national mandate.1 Similarly, ICNA (a smaller national Muslim organization) decided in 2015 to have as the theme for its fortieth annual convention that year, “Islam: the Connection between Purpose, Compassion, and Service.”2 Muslim American community service endeavors have grown markedly since 2010 and have included activities ranging from holiday food drives to disaster relief; both ICNA and ASMA asked those on their email lists to donate money after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in 2012, for example.3 This increased popularity has occurred not only

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because Muslim Americans hope to serve their domestic communities and, in so doing, to prove their moderation, but also because other kinds of pious practice have been foreclosed. While many Muslims fulfilled religious duties by giving to international charitable organizations in the past, legislation passed in the wake of 9/11 that criminalized providing “material support to terrorists,” knowingly or unknowingly, has made this much more difficult and even dangerous. Very few Muslim charitable organizations—mostly those operating in the Hamas-controlled region of Gaza, where engaging Hamas is required to deliver aid—have been convicted of aiding “terrorist groups.” Nevertheless, Muslim Americans fear giving to any charity that the US government may one day decide to criminalize and prosecute. Intentionally or not, the effect of this legislation has been to reduce the flow of money and voluntary labor going to Muslim communities overseas and to increase the amount of both going to aid in the United States.4 Still, performing more community service has not yet gained Muslim Americans increased acceptance. As of the summer of 2014, Americans regarded Muslims less warmly than any other religious group, according to polls conducted by the Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project.5 While Muslim Americans seem undaunted by such polls and may even be inspired to engage in more service because of them, other challenges have proved far more difficult to surmount. In February 2015, three young Muslim Americans devoted to community service were executed by a white neighbor in their North Carolina apartment complex. Speaking to a reporter after the funeral, one local woman expressed her disillusionment and fear. Muslims were told that they would be safe in America after 9/11 if they had “exemplary character” and performed such community service acts, she said. The murders of such ideal American Muslim citizens had shredded these hopes for her. “To see that it happened to them means it can happen to anyone.”6 While such increased service has failed to guarantee the acceptance or even the safety of Muslim Americans, it has indisputably helped further the goals of the most recent Republican and Democratic presidential administrations: shrinking the size of government and effecting economic recovery, respectively. This is particularly the case as the US government has cut the amount of federal funding going to service activities since 2011, thereby placing more of the financial burden of caring for disenfranchised and dispossessed citizens directly on other citizens. Muslim Americans trying to follow Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities in gaining acceptance through service may, like those other



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groups, find themselves faced with a struggle—financial, physical, ethical, and political—to avoid co-optation from the government as they try to meet the needs of their own communities and make their case for national inclusion. The greatest obstacle to the broad acceptance of Muslims in the United States is not their supposed lack of moderation. Rather, it is the continued specter of Islamic terrorism stoked by politicians such as the contenders for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and the attention given to militant groups such as ISIS—the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL or DAESH—an organization whose leaders met while imprisoned in a US detention center in Iraq and who formed a violent militia bent on ridding the area of US influence and establishing what they believe is a proper Islamic nation.7 ISIS has engaged in a concerted, and occasionally successful, effort to inspire disaffected young Muslim Americans to support them by joining their fight in the Middle East or, short of that, by launching terror attacks on US soil. While the prospect of such attacks unnerves most Americans—none more than Muslim parents, who worry about predatory attempts to recruit their children online— New America, a Washington research center, confirmed in 2015 what Department of Homeland Security analysts found in 2009: that the greatest threat of violence in the United States comes not from radicalized Muslims but from the white supremacists and right-wing, antigovernment domestic militias who have killed nearly twice as many people as would-be jihadists since 9/11.8 Terrorism has never been the province of Muslims alone. Since the Iranian hostage crisis of the late 1970s, however, the American media has focused much more on so-called Islamic terrorism than on the acts of terrorism, foreign and domestic, sponsored or committed by white Americans.9 As long as media outlets and politicians gain viewers and votes by stoking fears of Islam, Muslim Americans will continue to face obstacles to acceptance, regardless of how much community service they perform. As one might imagine, the focus on Muslim-led violence in this country not only poses problems for the acceptance of Muslims, it also distracts from other, more common kinds of violence in the United States. Take the national debate in 2015, for example, over whether or not to describe the actions of gunman Dylann Roof, who murdered worshippers in a South Carolina church with the express purpose of starting “a race war,” as terrorism.10 And recall Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which was correctly labeled terrorism as soon as it occurred—not coincidentally, because many assumed the act had been committed by Muslims

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rather than by a white American—but is not often remembered as something inspired by writings of the nation’s oldest terrorist population: white supremacists.11 More important than the way our national preoccupation with so-called Islamic terrorism diverts attention (and law enforcement resources) from such grandiose gestures of racial hatred and violence, however, is the way it obscures the systemic racism, including in the form of state violence, that daily impacts the lives of black and brown Americans, as well as the increasingly common violence directed against Muslim Americans and those taken to be Muslim. For Muslim Americans, confronting the specter of Islamic terrorism by proving that such violence does not represent the majority of Muslims—­ American or otherwise—is a noble task. Doing so without acknowledging the larger political dynamics to which this specter contributes—namely, the suggestion by many politicians that the violence Americans should worry about is committed by foreigners, non-whites, or non-Christians, rather than what is in fact more common: violence committed against racial and religious minorities and against women—will not ultimately serve any of these populations and will only perpetuate the prejudice, individual and systemic, faced by many in the United States. The same can be said about engaging in community service. The answer for those who want to prove their national loyalties through community service endeavors is not to refrain from assisting one’s neighbors or bettering one’s local or national community. Many devout Muslims—such as those who created the MuslimServe website and who firmly insist, with reference to Qur’anic passages, that God has called them to perform such acts of benevolence—would be reluctant to stop engaging in acts of service even if these activities came at a more direct cost to them. But Muslim Americans who do participate in such service efforts, particularly those involved in federal or other government programs, should recognize that, in addition to proving that Muslims are as patriotic and as concerned about the common good as anyone else, such actions can have other, less desirable ramifications. If community service renders some Muslims—those who are most economically able to engage in it—more acceptable and more American than others, that will replicate power dynamics at work decades earlier, when marginalized Catholics and Jews gained provisional acceptance by taking up the physical (and often financial) burden of providing community services to those disenfranchised and dispossessed by America’s unequal laws and institutions. Replicating these dynamics would mean confirming to many dominant Americans their preexisting ideas about the inherent pathology or inferiority



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of those whose skins seem darker, whose traditions seem different, or whose economic situations seem like natural consequences of their ostensible abilities rather than as the result, centuries in the making, of racist policies and individual prejudice. What Muslim Americans can do, instead—and what they are increasingly doing—is to partner with people whose races, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds are different from than their own, and to deliberate jointly (which will sometimes mean awkwardly and painfully) over the best ways to improve their communities, both through service and through demands for justice for those neglected or oppressed.12 Doing so involves not just acts of benevolence or charity, but also acts of solidarity stemming from the recognition that the fates of all racial, religious, and socio-economic groups—particularly marginalized ones—in the United States are fundamentally connected.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  Quoted in “Abraham’s Children and the Imperative of Peacemaking,” PeaceWatch 9, no. 3 (April 2003): 7. 2.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004). 3. Ibid., 5–6, 178. For the sake of clarity, I transliterate “shari‘ah” in the same manner as Rauf (though he does not always include the apostrophe); a more common transliteration is “shari‘a.” 4.  Peter King made these comments on Fox News on August 3, 2010. See Howard LaFranchi, “Is Ground Zero Mosque Imam Best Choice for Diplomatic Mission to Mideast?,” Christian Science Monitor online, August 11, 2010, ­http://www.­csmonitor .com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/0811/Is-ground-zero-mosque-imam-best-choice -for-diplomatic-mission-to-Mideast. 5.  In July 2010, Gingrich posted said statement on his website, accessed July 21, 2010, http://www.newt.org/newt-direct/newt-gingrich-statement-proposed-mosqueislamic -community-center-near-ground-zero (statement since removed). 6.  Newt Gingrich on Fox and Friends, August 16, 2010. 7.  Stewart discussed the issue on several 2010 episodes of The Daily Show, including on August 10, 2010 (“Municipal Land-Use Hearing Update”), August 16, 2010 (“MosqueErade”), August 19, 2010 (“Extreme Makeover Homeland Edition”), August 23, 2010 (“The Parent Company Trap”), and September 8, 2010 (“Weekend at Burnies”). 8.  A brief statement on the “immigrant religious experience” can be found in Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Forceful Voice of Reason,” in Voices of American Muslims: 23 Profiles, edited by Linda Cateura (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2005), 101. 9.  On how some of these ethnic (later, “white”) immigrants distanced themselves from racialized (“black”) populations, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Nathaniel Deutsch, Inventing America’s Worst Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); and Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race

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and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 10.  See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Joe Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (New York: Routledge, 2013) and How Blacks Built America: Labor, Culture, Freedom, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2015). 11.  For American ideas about the opposition between Sufism and fundamentalism, see Rosemary R. Corbett, “Islamic ‘Fundamentalism’: the Mission Creep of an American Religious Metaphor,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 4 (December 2015): 977–1004. 12.  I discuss these dynamics in detail in Rosemary R. Hicks, “Comparative Religion and the Cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian Mysticism into Liberal Islamic Modernity,” in The Politics of Secularism and Religion-Making, edited by Markus Dressler and Arvind Mandair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–69. 13.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, Islam: A Sacred Law: What Every Muslim Should Know About the Shari‘ah (Brattleboro, VT: Qibla Books, 2000), 4. 14.  “Interview: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf,” Frontline online, March 2002 (accessed March 8, 2004), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muslims/interviews/ feisal.html (emphasis added). 15. Ibid. 16.  “Cordoba Bread Fest: Children of Abraham Break Bread Together” ASMA Society, (accessed December 17, 2004), http://www.asmasociety.org/calendar/pastevents.html. The website misidentifies the event as having occurred in 2002. 17. Ibid. 18.  In a 2004 application for tax-exempt status, Cordoba’s lawyer described the Shariah Project as designed to “demonstrate to the world that Islamic holy law is compatible with a pluralistic and free democratic society and that peace and tolerance are authentic expressions of Islamic principles”; see Timothy McFlynn, Public Counsel of the Rockies, “Application for Recognition of Exemption,” filed with Internal Revenue Service under the Department of the Treasury, Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 14, 2004. Rauf later renamed the program, calling it the “Shariah Index Project” after 2008, and in 2012 elaborated on what it had become: a project that “would help determine the proper balance in the Muslim world (and elsewhere) between institutions of political power and authority, on the one hand, and institutions of religious power and authority, on the other—the Muslim equivalent of the religion-state relationship”; see Faisal Abdul Rauf, Moving the Mountain: A New Vision of Islam in America (New York: Free Press, 2012), 17. The Cordoba Initiative’s 2004 application also included a series of “Dialogues . . . between American and Middle Eastern religious as well as secular leaders” as part of their primary activities. When pressed by the IRS for more specific information on these programs, Cordoba’s lawyer responded with a letter that listed “economic development” and “the challenge of adapting principles of democracy and democratic capitalism to



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specific cultures” among the issues to be discussed; see Timothy McFlynn, Public Counsel of the Rockies, “Re: The Cordoba Initiative (EIN 41–2140798),” filed with Internal Revenue Service under the Department of the Treasury, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 14, 2004, 2–3. 19.  On Riverside Church, see Peter J. Paris, ed., The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 20.  For the production of “Judeo-Christian” identity, see J. T. Todd, “The Temple of Religion and the Politics of Religious Pluralism: Judeo-Christian America at the 1939– 1940 New York World’s Fair,” in After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 201–22; Deborah Dash Moore, “Jewish GIs and the Creation of the JudeoChristian Tradition,” Religion and American Culture 8, no. 1 (December 1998): 31–53; Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (December 1984), 65–85; and William Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 196–218. 21.  I have changed the names of some interlocutors in order to protect their privacy; such individuals are identified only by first name pseudonyms. During the first decade after 9/11, a common question was whether Muslims who live in the United States are more “Muslim” than “American.” Because I found my interlocutors to be like other US residents and citizens in having multiple affiliations and changing ways of expressing their relations to the people and places around them— as Dean illustrated by defining himself as Muslim and Catholic—and because I never asked about citizenship status, I do not define Muslim Americanness according to any one particular standard. Rather, I focus on how my interlocutors talked about being Muslim and being American, and I use the terms “Muslim American” and “American Muslim” interchangeably. For more on the overlapping attachments of Muslim Americans, see Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 22.  For more on the Jerrahi practice of dhikr and on the differences between Rauf ’s group and other Sufis at the Masjid al-Farah, see Rosemary R. Corbett, “Dhikr,” in ­Islamic Religious Practice in the United States, edited by Edward E. Curtis, IV (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming). 23.  Michael M. Grynbaum, “Daisy Khan, An Eloquent Face of Islam,” New York Times, November 12, 2010. 24.  These scholars have demonstrated that areas of American social life commonly seen in the twenty-first century as being free of religion often accommodate the Protestant practices around which American laws and institutions developed more than—or to the exclusion of—other practices and traditions. As Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini have described, American laws, institutions, and culture exert pressures on other traditions to resemble a specific kind of “market-Reformed Protestantism” in which freedom from religion is frequently freedom for the market; see “World Secularisms at the Millennium: Introduction,” Social Text 18, no. 3 64 (2000): 1–27. Like Jako-

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bsen and Pellegrini, my analysis of religion and secularism is informed greatly by Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). For more on how American legislation developed in tension with changing notions about the appropriate public role of Protestantism, see Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America; John F. Wilson and Donald L. Drakeman, eds., Church and State in American History: Key Documents, Decisions, and Commentary from the Past Three Centuries (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003); Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, “Religion Naturalized: The New Establishment,” in After Pluralism, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 82–97 and The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Rosemary R. Hicks, “Between Lived and the Law: Power, Empire, and Expansion in Studies of North American Religions,” Religion 42, no. 3 (2012): 409–24. 25.  Most of those important to my analysis argue within the genealogical tradition fostered by Michel Foucault, as it provides a robust means of accounting for how knowledge is related to power; see, especially, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). With regards to creating knowledge about Islam, specifically, I rely also on attention paid by Talal Asad, Richard Bulliet, and Edward Said to literary and dramatic devices in the disciplines of history and anthropology. In Orientalism (New York: Vintage, [1979] 2003), Edward Said utilizes the work of Foucault and critical historians to draw out the ubiquitous use of literary and dramatic devices in philological, historical, and political narratives and in the “Oriental Studies” and “Area Studies” programs that depended on them. Asad also demonstrates anthropologists’ tendencies to use such dramatic staging and literary devices in their writings about Islamic cultures and societies in The Idea of An Anthropology of Islam (Washington, DC: Georgetown Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1986). Significantly, as Bulliet and Melani McAlister have demonstrated, Said missed important differences between European and American approaches to Islam, especially in the ways American Cold War projects involved cultivating Arab allies and constructing post-Orientalist images. See Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 96–98 and Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 10–11. 26.  These ways of living and experiencing tradition are not necessarily conscious or intentional. Rather, they are part of the ongoing process of human interaction through which people learn stock ways of talking about and understanding life, and employ and enact such narratives in changing circumstances, thus altering them while making sense of their varying experiences. Works from this perspective that influenced my approach include Courtney Bender, Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver



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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Henry Goldschmidt, Race and Religion: the Chosen People of Crown Heights (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Voudou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); and Dorothy C. Holland, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 27. McAlister, Epic Encounters; Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Moustafa Bayoumi, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2015). My research has also been shaped by Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004). 28.  Two important analyses are Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 323–47 and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: the New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). I respond to Mahmood’s criticism in Chapter 1. 29.  On the NYPD surveillance program, which—like the NSA surveillance—failed to uncover or prosecute any would-be terrorists, see Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). On the US government’s other actions, which have since become the subject of lawsuits, see Larry Neumeister, “Lawsuit Seeks to Memorialize a Less Heroic Side of 9/11,” Associated Press, June 21, 2015, http://big story.ap.org/article/34bf188788534c73a602c0013fbcef4a/lawsuit-seeks-memorialize-less -heroic-side-911; and Jenifer Fenton, “Does FBI Use No-Fly List to Pressure Muslims to Become Informants?,” Al-Jazeera America online, June 11, 2015, http://america.aljazeera .com/articles/2015/6/11/does-fbi-use-no-fly-list-to-pressure-muslims-to-become-infor mants.html. 30.  Sam Stein, “‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Imam Helped FBI With Counterterrorism Efforts,” Huffington Post, August 17, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/17/ ground-zero-imam-helped-f_n_685071.html. For a broader overview of issues facing Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, see Louise A. Cainkar, Homeland Insecurity: the Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/11 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009). 31.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, “In God We Trust: The Prospects for the Future of Islam and the West are Positive,” in Debating Moderate Islam: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West, edited by M. A. Muqtedar Khan (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), 95. 32. Ibid., 98–99. 33. Ibid., 97. 34.  Mahmood Mamdani, “Culture Talk: Six Debates that Shape the Discourse on ‘Good’ Muslims,” in Debating Moderate Islam: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West, edited by M. A. Muqtedar Khan (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), 114–23.

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Chapter 1 1.  See Moore, “Jewish GIs”; Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition”; and Todd, “Temple of Religion.” On how conservative evangelicals adopted the term to express opposition to secularism and support of Israel, see Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 201–3. 2.  William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3.  Quoted in James C. McKinley, Jr., “Oklahoma Surprise: Islam as an Election Issue,” New York Times, November 15, 2010 (emphasis added). 4.  Quoted in Edward E. Curtis, IV, Muslims in America: A Short History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 106–7. 5.  Luke Johnson, “Rick Santorum: Equality Comes from ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ Not Islam,” Huffington Post, January 21, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com /2012/01/21/rick-santorum-equality-islam-religion-south-carolina_n_1220767.html. 6.  Newt Gingrich, Religion and Politics: The Legitimate Role (Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, 1994), 1. 7.  Kevin Knoblock’s America At Risk: The War with No Name (Washington, DC: Citizens United Productions, 2010) is distributed by Gingrich Productions. For Gingrich’s books, see Newt Gingrich and Joe DeSantis, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010) and Newt Gingrich and Vince Haley, A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011). DeSantis was communications director at Gingrich Communications when he co-authored To Save America, while Haley was policy director of Gingrich’s 2011–2012 presidential campaign when he cowrote their book. Because these coauthors worked as Gingrich’s official spokespersons, I refer solely to Gingrich as author in the text. 8.  For example, Gingrich repeatedly proposed the death penalty for drug-related offenses (his “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act” failed in committee in 1996 and 1997), while Rauf opposes capital punishment; see Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 68–71. 9.  See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37–59. 10.  Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1960). 11. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 73–76. 12. Ibid., 80. 13. Ibid., 82–83. 14. Ibid., 16. 15. Ibid., 82–83. 16. Ibid., 83–84. For Rauf, the Abrahamic ethic lived out in the community of the Prophet and his first four successors (according to Sunni tradition) evidenced “the con-



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ceptual seeds of democratic governance.” While these years were the most exemplary of Muslim governance, with a few exceptions, “democracy as we know it today did not truly take root and flower until a few millennia later, with the advent of the American Revolution” (80). 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 85. 19. Ibid., 32, 248. 20. Ibid., 86–88. 21. Ibid., 109–10. 22. Ibid., 111. 23. Ibid., 85. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. Ibid.,153–4, 158–9, 205. 26. Ibid., 6–8, 125. 27. Ibid., 275. 28.  Roger Cohen, “Shariah at the Kumback Café,” New York Times, December 6, 2010. 29.  Incidents included a mosque site in Tennessee vandalized by arson, a New York cab driver stabbed, and a mosque in Florida bombed; see Paul Vitello, “Church Rejects Sale of Building for a Mosque,” New York Times, July 22, 2010; “FBI Finds Pipe Bomb Used in Blast at Fla. Mosque,” AOL News, May 12, 2010, http://www.aolnews.com/crime/ article/fbi-finds-pipe-bomb-used-in-blast-at-fla-mosque/19475001; Lucas L. Johnson, II, and Travis Loller, “Tennessee Mosque Site Fire was Arson, Police Say,” Huffington Post, August 30, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/z2010/08/30/murfreesboro-mosque -fire-arson-accelerant_n_699696.html; John Eligon, “Hate Crime Charges in Stabbing of a Cabdriver,” New York Times, August 30, 2010. 30.  Plans to build mosques and community centers in locations across the country were challenged while the Park51 debate unfolded; Phil Willon, “Planned Temecula Valley Mosque Draws Opposition,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2010. 31.  On Gingrich’s 2010 film, America at Risk, see Scott Shane, “In Islamic Law, Gingrich Sees Moral Threat to the U.S.,” New York Times, December 21, 2011. 32.  Roger Cohen, “Shariah at the Kumback Café.” 33.  On Gingrich and other Republican presidential candidates’ pledges to outlaw shari‘ah, see Andrea Elliot, “The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement,” New York Times, July 30, 2011. 34.  In addition to differences over Israel-Palestine, Rauf argues that the United States missed an opportunity to build alliances when it demonized Ayatollah Khomeini and sheltered the shah (What’s Right with Islam, 160). In contrast, Gingrich has advocated isolating Iran’s “pro-terrorist, anti-American regime” since the 1990s (Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 168). 35.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 6. 36. Ibid., 12–13. 37.  Forrest Church, The American Creed: A Spiritual and Patriotic Primer, or, A Biography of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Saint Martin’s, 2002).

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38.  Quoted in ibid., xii. 39.  Quoted in ibid., 1. 40. Ibid., 22. 41. Ibid., 32–33. 42. Ibid., 82 (emphasis added). 43. Ibid., 24. 44. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 2, 215; Church, American Creed, 134; Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 25, 46, 101, 117–20. 45. Church, American Creed, 31. 46.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 22–23, 82; Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 211–15. 47. Church, American Creed, 137. 48. Ibid., 124. 49. Ibid., 113. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 114. 52.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 57. 53. Church, American Creed, 94–97, 121–22; Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 230–243. 54.  On the “Islamic bloc,” see Gingrich and DeSantis, To Save America, 51. Gingrich discusses the UN and Israel far more in his 2010 book than in his 2011 narrative, which focuses mainly on what he depicts as the grievous errors by the political left and President Obama of cowering before “radical Islamist ideology” and “scaling back America’s role in the world” (173). 55.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 100; Church, American Creed, 21–22. 56.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 26–33, 100–1. 57.  Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), 8–13. Recognizing that many of the founders were anti-Catholic, Novak traces Locke’s natural law theories to medieval systematic theologian Thomas Aquinas (83–94, 157–60). 58.  Michael Novak, Introduction to Family, Society, Politics, vol. 5 of G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 15–33. 59.  Harvey identifies the American Enterprise Institute as among the think tanks established in the 1970s with corporate funding to promote neoliberal policies; see Brief History, 43–44. Although the term “neoliberal” has rarely been used positively in recent years, Michael Novak did employ it to describe colleagues like Daniel Patrick Moynihan who were also in favor of democratic capitalism; see The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Madison, [1981] 1991), 111. Novak’s recent reluctance to use the term is likely due to Pope John Paul II’s condemnation of neoliberalism in his 1999 apostolic exhortation, “Ecclesia in America,” Vatican, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_22011999_ecclesia-in-america_en.html. 60.  Michael Novak, Three in One: Essays on Democratic Capitalism, 1976–2000, edited by Edward Wayne Younkins (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 63; see also Spirit, 39–40.



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61.  Gingrich and DeSantis, To Save America, 328–30. 62.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 100, 118, 240. Importantly, Gingrich and Haley also included material in A Nation Like No Other that resembles Michael Novak’s discussion of Locke in Toward a Theology of the Corporation, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1981). The publication of the latter volume was made possible with funding from the SmithKline Corporation. Novak acknowledges that his research on this project preceded and influenced his later writings on “democratic capitalism” (Toward a Theology, 1). 63.  See especially Novak, Spirit, 351–54. There, Novak explains that no free society should be controlled by religion, but that Christian values of charity and loving one’s neighbor will flourish in the context of religious and market freedom. 64. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 248. 65. Novak, On Two Wings, 90 (emphasis added). 66.  See Irving Kristol, “The Disaffection from Capitalism,” in Capitalism and Socialism: A Theological Inquiry, edited by Irving Kristol (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1979), 27 and Seymour Martin Lipset, “American Exceptionalism” in Capitalism and Socialism, 34–52. 67.  On the white ethnic revival, see Frye Jacobson, Roots Too, and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2010), 272–81. 68. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 281. 69. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 281. See also Frye Jacobson, Roots Too, 180–233. 70.  See Moore, “Jewish GIs”; Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition”; Todd, “Temple of Religion”; Schultz, Tri-Faith America; and Wilson and Drakeman, Church and State. 71. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White. 72.  On how some of these ethnic (later, “white”) immigrants distanced themselves from other racialized populations, see the works listed in the Introduction, note 9. 73.  While Timothy Marr argues that Locke’s influence was rivaled by Montesquieu’s, Bernard Bailyn maintains that Montesquieu’s influence was clearly greater; see Marr, Cultural Roots, 23, and Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 344–45. 74.  A more detailed account of changes in American Lockean philosophy can be found in Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Lee Ward, John Locke and Modern Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as in Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and the End of the Cold War,” in International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, edited by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 85–108. 75.  The quote is Kenneth B. McIntyre’s description of political scientist Leo Strauss’ work. As McIntyre notes, “Strauss’s work is almost universally dismissed by philosophers and historians, yet he has attracted a following amongst political theorists . . . and neoconservative political activists”; see McIntyre, “The Right’s False Prophet,” American

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Conservative online, May 9, 2012, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ the-rights-false-prophet/. Ironically, Strauss opposed Locke’s liberalism, which, as he saw it, deconstructed the necessary moral and authoritarian supports for democracy by separating church and state. This depiction of Locke was part of Strauss’ diagnosis of what he considered to be America’s mid-century political malaise—a diagnosis that was largely adopted by Novak’s AEI colleague, Irving Kristol, who severely criticized Johnson’s Great Society programs, some aspects of the New Deal, and what he and others considered to be “the interventionist excesses of a so-called ‘liberal elite’”; see Harvey, Brief History, 50. For Strauss’ influence on Kristol, see Shadia B. Drury’s Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 137–78. 76.  Kristol extolled the “Puritan Temper” and “Protestant Ethic” earlier than did many of his colleagues, publishing an analysis of it along with his coauthor, Daniel Bell in Capitalism Today (New York: Basic, 1971), 49–53. 77.  Muhammad Abdul-Rauf ’s progress narrative can be found in A Brief History of Islam: With Special Reference to Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1964). 78.  See, for example, Isma‘il al-Faruqi, Introduction to Kitab al-Tawhid: Essay on the Unicity of Allah, or, What is Due Allah from His Creatures, by Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdal Wahhab, translated by Isma‘il Al-Faruqi (Beirut: IIFSO, 1979), as well as al-Faruqi’s Tawḥid: Its Implications for Thought and Life (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1982). 79.  James Carroll, “The Gift of Reconciliation,” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2010. 80.  See Isma‘il al-Faruqi, ed., Trialogue of the Abrahamic Faith Traditions: Papers Presented to the Islamic Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion, 3rd ed. (Alexandria, VA: Al-Saadawi Publications, 1991). 81.  Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, “The Islamic Doctrine of Economics and Contemporary Economic Thought,” in Capitalism and Socialism: A Theological Inquiry, edited by Michael Novak (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1979), 129–52; Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984). 82. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 286. On crediting his father for “pass[ing] the baton to me,” see Carroll, “Gift.” 83. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 207–8. 84. Ibid., 65. 85. Ibid., 70. 86. Ibid., 210. 87. Ibid. 88. Novak, Toward a Theology, 7. 89. Novak, Spirit, 47. 90. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 254; on “economic barriers,” see 234–35. Both Novak and Rauf also accept the need for basic social safety nets born of the New Deal



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such as Social Security and Disability Insurance, as well as welfare programs, although with some reservations; see Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 232–33. According to Novak in the 1970s, “democratic capitalism, however grudgingly, adopts social welfare programs, often initially sponsored by socialists”; see Spirit, 218. But Novak followed that grudging acceptance with racialized imagery, criticizing the “welfare dependency” that, he argued, resulted in increased out-of-wedlock births in black communities and affected the “marital behavior” of black men (222). “Indeed, few American citizens,” he writes, “are more highly visible in the U.S. media today than the militant young black man on welfare and perhaps on the edge of desperation and revolt” (154). Rauf, in the meantime, has minimized the importance of social safety nets for developing countries, listing them behind other needed reforms in the Muslim world such as the “creation or reform of banking systems, capital and stock markets, and sound monetary policies” that will guarantee “stable currencies and low inflation”; see What’s Right with Islam, 253–54. 91. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 6. 92. Ibid., 64. Additionally, Rauf argues, Sufi traditions can help train adherents to cultivate a healthy detachment from material wealth that—while constituting a social good when redistributed through charity, as Islam requires—can become a distraction (ibid., 66–69). 93. Ibid., 2. 94.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 116–18, especially. 95. Ibid., 10. 96. Ibid., 117–22. The quote from Novak appears on 118. 97. Novak, Spirit, 253, 26. 98. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 232. 99. Ibid., 151. Rauf notes that he “owes many of the ideas” in his section on the corporation to John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003), but Micklethwait and Wooldridge do not discuss the corporation as an example of separated powers. That material can be found, instead, in Novak, Spirit, 326, 353. 100. Ibid., 268. 101. Ibid., 127. 102.  Gingrich and Haley, Nation Like No Other, 48. 103.  This interpretation of zakat as a “right” is supported by, among others, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. In January 2008, the Council posted California physician and author Khalid Baig’s essay “Zakat: Right of the Poor” on its website and continued to feature it there throughout the following five years of economic recession; see Council of the Islamic Organization of Greater Chicago, accessed June 1, 2013, http://www.ciogc.org/Go.aspx?link=7654465. 104. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 51–52. 105. Ibid., 2, 47, 62, 217, 307. 106. Ibid., 66. 107.  The commonality between immigrant Muslims who Americanize like other immigrants and black American Muslims whose sociology is rooted in a history of slavery,

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according to Rauf, lies in the fact that both feel that they are treated with suspicion after 9/11 because they are Muslim; see What’s Right with Islam, 220–21. 108. Ibid., 221–24, 228–29. Rauf mentions the Catholic charities and welfare agencies as an example of this trend in his endnotes (303 n. 57). 109. Ibid., 225. 110.  “Karzai, Khan, and Levitt,” This Week with Christiane Amanpour, ABC News, August 15, 2010, full transcript available at http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week -transcript-karzai-khan-levitt/story?id=11454631. 111.  Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 85. 112.  Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 331. Mahmood attributes this quote to “State Department planners,” though she actually derives the words from the 2003 RAND Corporation essay that is her primary source material. See Cheryl Benard, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2003). 113. Ibid., 332, 336–37. The wording here is also from RAND. 114. Ibid., 346. 115.  See also Hicks, “Comparative Religion.” 116.  Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 340–41. 117. Ibid., 340. While Rauf does contrast his understanding of Islam to that of fundamentalists, he defined fundamentalism in 2004 as a “psychological reaction” to “militant secularism” and material deprivation, not as a faulty strategy of overly literal interpretation. He more fully discussed this view in “Fundamentalism and the Modern World: A Dialogue with Karen Armstrong, Susannah Heschel, Jim Wallis, and Feisal Abdul Rauf,” Sojourners Magazine 31, no. 2 (March–April 2002), https://sojo.net/ magazine/march-april-2002/fundamentalism-and-modern-world. 118.  Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 323. 119.  On the public school wars and American Protestant secularism, especially, see Fessenden, Culture and Redemption. More on the contemporary valences of American Protestant-secularism can be found in Jakobsen and Pellegrini, “World Secularisms” and Hicks, “Between Lived and the Law.”

Chapter 2 1. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 283. 2.  The quote is from Kevin M. Schultz’s summary and critique of Herberg, which first appeared in the Institute on Religion and Public Life’s magazine as “ProtestantCatholic-Jew, Then and Now,” First Things online, January 2006, http://www.firstthings. com/article/2006/01/protestant-catholic-jewthen-and-now. 3.  Rosemary R. Corbett, “For God and Country: Religious Minorities Claiming National Belonging Through Community Service,” Religion and American Culture 26, no. 2 (Summer 2016), 227–59. 4. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 254. 5. Bulliet, Case, 98–100. 6.  On the quote and Igram, see GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 234–39.



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7. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 258–59. 8.  The Islamic Center of Washington, DC, was founded by members of the Washington Mosque Foundation, an organization local diplomats created after failing to find a mosque large enough for the 1944 funeral of Turkish Ambassador Münir Ertegün. In funding the mosque and Islamic center for ambassadors and other DC residents, several Muslim-majority governments recognized the chance to improve diplomatic relations with the United States. See Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, History of the Islamic Center: From Dream to Reality (Washington, DC: The Center, 1978). 9.  Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Eisenhower’s 1957 Speech at Islamic Center of Washington,” IIP Digital, June 26, 2007, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2007 /06/20070626154822lnkais0.6946985.html#ixzz2J0Hohnd0. 10.  Quoted in Bulliet, Case, 99. 11. Ibid., 100. 12. Ibid., 101. 13.  For depictions of Muslims in American media during these decades, see McAlister, Epic Encounters, 100–234. On the FBI and Nation of Islam, see Edward E. Curtis, IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 69, 80–88, 112–13. 14.  Edward E. Curtis, IV, “Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics: Black Muslims in the Era of the Arab Cold War,” in Black Routes to Islam, edited by Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 49–68. For discussion of other black American Muslim communities in the United States, see also Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Edward E. Curtis, IV, The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States (New York: Columbia University, 2008); and Marc Ferris, “‘To Achieve the Pleasure of Allah’: Immigrant Muslim Communities in New York City 1893–1991,” in Muslim Communities in North America, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idelman Smith (Albany: State University of New York, 1994), 212–13. 15.  Donald Janson, “Muslims Press Race Separation,” New York Times, February 28, 1963. 16.  “Malcolm X Scores U.S. and Kennedy,” New York Times, December 2, 1963. 17.  Curtis, “Islamism,” 56. 18. Ibid., 56–59. 19.  As Schultz argues, increasing US attachment to Israel has often deepened conservative Protestants’ antipathies towards Muslims instead of making Protestants more willing to embrace them; see Tri-Faith America, 199–204 as well as Thomas Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 120–64 and McAlister, Epic Encounters, 155–97. 20. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 110–15; Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 559–62 and Waldo E. Martin, “‘Nation Time!’: Black Nationalism, the Third World, and Jews,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in

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the United States, edited by Jack Salzman and Cornell West (New York: Oxford, 1997), 341–56. For contemporary attempts to overcome this historic divide by creating antiMuslim black-Jewish coalitions, see Jodi Eichler-Levine and Rosemary R. Hicks, “‘As Americans Against Genocide’: The Crisis in Darfur and Interreligious Political Activism,” American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (September 2007): 711–35. 21.  For how the Vietnam War’s cost undermined Johnson’s Great Society programs, see Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin, 2015). On the 1960s rightward tilt in the GOP (fueled initially by Barry Goldwater’s insistence on repealing Roosevelt’s social programs), see Jeff Madrick, Age of Greed (New York: Random House, 2007). 22. Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 6. 23.  On neo-conservatives and the Nation of Islam, see GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 275–83. 24. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 125–40. 25.  See Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), and Sean Willentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper, 2008). 26.  Quoted in “Elijah Muhammad Dead; Black Muslim Leader, 77,” New York Times, February 26, 1975. 27.  Quoted in Dawn-Marie Gibson, A History of the Nation of Islam: Race, Islam, and the Quest for Freedom (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 69. 28.  “Black Muslim,” New York Times, February 28, 1975. 29.  In addition to changing the organization’s name (several times), Mohammed emphasized the Sunni pillars of Islam, abolished the Fruit of Islam defense militia, removed the seats inside mosques so Muslims could prostrate while praying, and asserted that there is “no superiority in any color.” As scholars of American Islam point out, these changes were not simply capitulations to Sunni authorities but the “indigenizing” of mainstream Islamic traditions in ways that allowed for a reinterpretation of NOI doctrine and narratives; see GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 285–89; Curtis, Islam in Black America, 107–28. 30.  Former followers of Elijah Muhammad who split from Mohammed and allied with Louis Farrakhan’s reconstituted Nation of Islam began to observe Savior’s Day celebrations again in 1981; see, on the website of the NOI-affiliated newsletter, Ashahed M. Muhammad, “Savior’s Day: A Timeline and Brief History,” Final Call, last updated February 24, 2008, http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Perspectives_1/Saviours_ Day_A_Timeline_and_Brief_History_4423.shtml. W. D. Mohammed attended Farrakhan’s 2000 Savior’s Day celebration in an attempt to reconcile the two movements. 31.  On contests over authority and resources, see Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 32.  See GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 261. 33.  During a May 1972 rally in Harlem that followed the altercation, Abdul-Rauf— then serving as director of the Islamic Center in Washington, DC—unequivocally sup-



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ported the NOI. Speaking for himself and his associates, Abdul-Rauf had “come to express our admiration for your work and the great achievements of the beloved leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I would like to assure you all,” Abdul-Rauf told the attendees, “that the whole Muslim world, which includes 700 million people, is behind you.” Quoted in the Central Committee of the Islamic Party, “Editorial,” Islamic Party of North America News (Spring 1972), 2. Thanks to Abbas Barzegar for this reference. 34.  Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, Bilal Ibn Rabah: A Leading Companion of the Prophet Muhammad (Plainfield, IL: American Trust Publications, 1977), iii. 35. Ibid. 36.  All quotes taken from Ghayth Nur Kashif, Introduction to Bilal Ibn Rabah: A Leading Companion of the Prophet Muhammad, by Muhammad Abdul-Rauf (Plainfield, IL: American Trust Publications, 1977), vi. 37. Abdul-Rauf, Bilal Ibn Rabah, 71. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 72. 40. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 289. See also Curtis, Islam in Black America, 114–15 on ties between W. D. Mohammed’s movement and the new Egyptian leader, Anwar al-Saddat, as well as on ties with Gulf nations during this time. 41.  Bilalian News, March 3, 1978, 3, as quoted in Curtis, Islam in Black America, 116. 42.  Details of the hostage-taking are drawn from multiple media accounts, including Phil McCombs and Charles R. Babcock, “Gunmen: People Will Die Unless We Get Our Demands,” Washington Post, March 10, 1977; Charles R. Babcock and Kevin Klose, “From Beginning to End, 38–Hour Drama Unfolded Slowly,” Washington Post, March 12, 1977; Phil McCombs and Megan Rosenfeld, “Calm Hostages Read Koran, Polite Gunmen Answer Calls,” Washington Post, March 11, 1977; and Phil McCombs, “The Hanafi Takeover: One Year Later,” Washington Post, March 5, 1978; as well as Tom Matthews, “Seizing Hostages Scourge of the 70s,” Newsweek, March 21, 1977, 16; and “Terrorism: The 38 Hours: Trial by Terror,” Time, March 21, 1977. 43.  Matthews, “Seizing Hostages,” 16. 44. “Terrorism.” 45.  Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address,” January 19, 1978, Jimmy Carter Library, accessed March 2, 2013, http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/speeches/ su78jec.phtml. 46.  Mercy Corps was originally founded in 1979 as Save the Refugees Fund but changed to Mercy Corps International in 1982 and then simply Mercy Corps in 1984; see “Our History,” Mercy Corps, accessed January 3, 2014, http://www.mercycorps.org/ about-us/our-history. 47.  Mohammed’s “pulpit” exchange with Washington, DC, rabbi Joshua Haberman is noted in Marjorie Hyer, “Faiths Join to Wish Success at Camp David,” Washington Post, September 8, 1978. Instead of describing whites as literal “devils” to be hated, Mohammed argued, NOI teachings on race were meant metaphorically—as instructing believers to hate the evil (here, whiteness instead of blackness) inside of themselves and others. On changes in racial doctrine, see Curtis, Islam in Black America, 113–14.

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48.  Nathaniel Sheppard, Jr., “Islamic Leader Says Organization is Taking a Turn Toward Patriotism,” New York Times (May 25, 1978). 49.  Quoted in Nathaniel Sheppard, “Islamic Leader Says Organization is Taking a Turn Toward Patriotism,” New York Times, May 25, 1978. 50.  For coverage in the New York Times, see Nathaniel Sheppard, “Black Muslim Movement Divided in Dispute Over Doctrinal Changes,” March 7, 1978, and “Islamic Leader Says Organization is Taking a Turn,” May 25, 1978, as well as Paul Delaney, “Radical Changes By New Leader Leave Many Muslims Disaffected,” December 25, 1978. 51.  For coverage in the Washington Post, see Marjorie Hyer, “Three Faiths Stage Friendly Talks,” October 28, 1977, and “Faiths Join to Wish Success at Camp David” September 9, 1978. 52.  Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, “Pilgrimage to Mecca,” National Geographic Magazine 154, no. 5 (November 1978): 581–609. 53.  Marjorie Hyer, “Interfaith Religious Service Praises Peace Treaty,” Washington Post, March 27, 1979. 54. Abdul-Rauf, Muslim’s Reflections, ix. 55.  On opposition by Hayek and his supporters to the Keynesianism that emerged during the Great Depression and their influence in the United States, see Harvey, Brief History, 19–23. 56.  William Baroody, “President’s Foreword” in A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism, by Muhammad Abdul-Rauf (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984), v. 57. Abdul-Rauf, Muslim’s Reflections, x. 58.  In a 2010 interview with the Catholic lay publication which Novak co-founded, Novak described his colleague, Irving Kristol, as pivotal in turning him toward thinkers like Hayek; see Joop Koopman, “Theology of the Corporation: A Conversation with Michael Novak,” Crisis Magazine online, October 23, 2010, http://www.crisismagazine .com/2010/theology-of-the-corporation-a-conversation-with-michael-novak. 59. Abdul-Rauf, Muslim’s Reflections, 34. 60. Ibid., 18, 68 n. 4. 61. Ibid., 34 (emphasis added). 62.  John Esposito, “Ismail R. Al-Faruqi: Muslim Scholar-Activist,” in The Muslims of America, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 76. 63. Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, “Judaism and Christianity in the Perspective of Islam,” in Trialogue of the Abrahamic Faith Traditions: Papers Presented to the Islamic Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion, 3rd ed., edited by Isma‘il Al-Faruqi (Alexandria, VA: Al-Saadawi Publications, 1991), 22–23. 64.  Donnel Nunes, “Muslim Strife Reaches Islamic Center,” Washington Post, April 21, 1980. 65. Ibid. 66.  Earle H. Waugh, Baha Abu-Laban, and Regula B. Qureshi, Introduction to The Muslim Community in North America (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1983), 1–10.



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67.  Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, “The Future of the Islamic Tradition in North America,” in Muslim Community in North America, edited by Earle H. Waugh, Baha AbuLaban, and Regula B. Qureshi (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1983), 272, 274. 68. Ibid., 277. 69.  See, particularly, Isma‘il al-Faruqi, Islam (Belsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1994), 57. 70.  Isma‘il al-Faruqi, “Islamic Ideals in North America,” in The Muslim Community in North America, edited by Earle H. Waugh, Baha Abu-Laban, and Regula B. Qureshi (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1983), 266. For “untermensch,” see 260. 71.  See Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, “Sunnah and Hadith and Their Importance in Modern Context,” in Shari‘ah, Ummah, and Khilafa, by Halil Inalcik, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, and Isma‘il R. al-Faruqi (Karachi, Pakistan: University of Karachi, 1987), 80. Compare this with Abdul-Rauf ’s thoughts in Muslim’s Reflections, 26. 72. Harvey, Brief History, 23–31. 73. Curtis, Islam in Black America, 122–27. 74.  Quoted in Koopman, “Theology of the Corporation.” 75.  On the rise of such “military multiculturalism” and political conservatives’ use of it in the 1990s to argue against affirmative action and multiculturalism, see McAlister, Epic Encounters, 235–65. 76. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 334–35. 77.  For more detail on these events, including excerpts of original documents and speeches, see GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 332–37. On W. D. Mohammed’s contract with the US military, see Curtis, Muslims in America, 121. On the first Muslim chaplain, see Edward E. Curtis, IV, “United States Military” in Encyclopedia of Muslim American History (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 562 and GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 340. 78.  On Clinton administration attempts to make Muslim allies, see GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 339–40. 79. Ibid., 343–44, 369–75. 80. Ibid., 351–54. The history of Islamic Relief, USA, is drawn from the “History” page of the organization’s website, accessed February 19, 2015, http://www.irusa.org/history/. 81.  For a brief discussion of Muslim-led charities suspected of undermining US interests, particularly after 9/11, see GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 351. Not all Muslim-led organizations engaged in overseas humanitarian work came under suspicion. Islamic Relief, USA, for example, sponsored relief and development projects in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan in the 1990s and received positive media attention for some of it, although not for their simultaneous domestic relief and emergency response work; see Islamic Relief, USA “History.”

Chapter 3 1.  All quotes derive from Feisal Abdul Rauf, “‘I Do Not Recognize Myself ’ this Ramadan: War Against Impulse that Resorts to Violence,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 2001.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

2.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1995), xii. 3.  In their 1998 application for 501(c)(3) status, Rauf and Khan described ASMA as “formed to enhance the general public’s knowledge and understanding of the religion of Islam and Sufism and to promote spiritual and personal development through meditation and prayer”; see American Sufi Muslim Association, Application for recognition of exemption under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Form 1023. 4.  “Islam and America, Three Years After 9/11: Interview with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf,” Beliefnet, 2004 (accessed November 11, 2005), http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/ Islam/2005/02/Islam-And-America-Three-Years-After-911.aspx?p=1+a+2005. 5.  See Hicks, “Comparative Religion” and Corbett, “Islamic ‘Fundamentalism.’” 6.  One exception to this trend is West African Sufis who immigrated in the 1990s, settled in Harlem, and—the difficulties of their lives notwithstanding—often argue that the American dream is still a reality. Despite their upward mobility, however, State Department officials seeking to influence Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia have rarely sought these more recent US residents as spokespersons; see Zain Abdullah, Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Ousmane Kane, The Homeland Is the Arena: Religion, Transnationalism, and the Integration of Senegalese Immigrants in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7.  Statistics from Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003). For histories of African Muslim slaves, see Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997). 8.  Rich Schapiro, “NYC Plans Memorial at Wall Street Slave Market from 1700s,” New York Daily News, April 15, 2015. 9.  On the Transcendentalists, Hafiz, and Rumi, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2005), 82–84 and “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003): 273–302. See also Wai-chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History 13, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 755–75. 10.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Scotts Valley, CA: IAP Press, 2009), 232–33. 11.  See Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Cosmopolitan Piety: Sympathy, Comparative Religions, and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965, edited by Laurie F. Maffly, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valerie (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 199–221 and Schmidt, Restless Souls, 251–54. For American fascinations with India, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India, and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999). On orientalism and early twentieth-century American consumer habits, see McAlister, Epic Encounters, 20–29.



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12.  Gisela Webb, “Third Wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship,” in Sufism in the West, edited by Jamal Malik and John Hinnells (New York: Routledge, 2006), 86–102. 13.  James Jervis, “The Sufi Order in the West and Pir Vilayat ‘Inayat Khan: SpaceAge Spirituality in Contemporary Euro-America,” in New Trends and Developments in the World of Islam, edited by Peter B. Clarke (London: Luzac Oriental, 1997), 211–60. 14. Curtis, Islam in Black America, 45–46, 62. 15.  See Curtis, Columbia Sourcebook, 22–29 and 46–58. 16.  Robert Rozehnal, “Faqir or Faker? The Pakpattan Tragedy and the Politics of Sufism in Pakistan,” Religion 36, no. 1 (March 2006): 34–35. 17.  Carl Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997), 1–18. 18.  Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis: The Defence, Re-Thinking, and Rejection of Sufism in the Modern World (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999). 19.  J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, [1971] 1998), 253. 20.  Layla Amzi, “The Survival of Sufism in the Turkish Republic: Sheikh Muzaffer Özak and the Halveti-Cerrahi Order,” Master’s thesis, New York University, 2006, 17. 21.  Ahmet T. Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 215–34 and Umut Azak, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion, and the Nation State (London: I. B. Taurus, 2010). On the change among Sufi orders, see Thierry Zarcone, “The Transformation of the Sufi Orders (Tarikat) in the Turkish Republic and the Question of Crypto-Sufism,” in Cultural Horizons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat Halman, edited by Jayne Warner (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 199. 22.  Details on Nasr’s life are drawn from “Biography,” Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation, accessed October 10, 2006, http://www.nasrfoundation.org/bios.html. 23.  Ananda Coomaraswamy first brought ideas about mysticism, theosophy, and Perennialism, along with South Asian artifacts, to Boston in 1917. He then served as “Keeper of Indian Arts” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until the mid-1930s, when his title was changed to research fellow in “Indian, Persian, and Mohammedan Art.” On Coomaraswamy, see “Biography,” Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation, accessed October 10, 2006, http://www.nasrfoundation.org/bios.html. For a larger overview of Perennialism, see King, Orientalism and Religion, 120–41, 160–82. 24.  “Biography,” Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation. On Schuon’s involvement in the ‘Alawiyya-Shadhiliya order and his later creation of the Maryamiyya (or Miriamiyya) Sufi order, see Erik S. Ohlander, “Maryamiyya Sufi Order” in Encyclopedia of MuslimAmerican History, edited by Edward E. Curtis, IV (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 361–62. 25.  While Nasr spent much time on the work of Andalusian-born philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi and his Persian contemporary, al-Suhrawardi, he increasingly focused on Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra’s seventeenth-century syntheses of Suhrawardi, Neo-­ Platonism, and Islamic theology. For an overview of Nasr’s work, see the essays in

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Lewis E. Hahn, Randall E Auxier, and Lucian W. Stone, eds. The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2001). I briefly discuss Nasr’s academic work in Iran in Hicks, “Comparative Religion.” 26.  On the dominance of Sufism in American religious studies departments, see Marcia Hermansen, “The Academic Study of Sufism at American Universities,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24, no. 3 (2007): 23–45. Steven M. Wasserstrom also discusses Nasr’s influence briefly (albeit in a less nuanced manner) in Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 27.  Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968). 28.  On the variety of US Sufi orders, see Marcia Hermansen, “Literary Productions of Western Sufi Movements,” in Sufism in the West, edited by Jamal Malik and John Hinnells (New York: Routledge 2006), 28–48. 29.  See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987) and The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2002). 30.  Nasr and French Orientalist Henri Corbin established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy under the patronage of the Pahlavi empress. While the government chartered the Academy to construct a pre-Islamic nationalist history, Nasr focused on Shi‘i traditions, Sufism, and philosophy. In the 1970s, Nasr’s connections to the Iranian government intensified—a relationship one scholar describes as “regime religiosity,” wherein the monarchy quieted its previous claims to a pre-Islamic heritage so as to combat the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini; see Matthjis Van den Bos, Mystic Regimes: Sufism and the State in Iran, from the Late Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 112–14. 31.  Ohlander, “Maryamiyya Sufi Order,” 361; GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 301. 32.  Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Foreword to A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism, by Muhammad Abdul-Rauf (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984), vii–viii. 33.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, Introduction to The Universal Sprit of Islam, by Judith Fitzgerald and Michael Oren Fitzgerald (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Press, 2006), xvii–xviii. 34.  Amzi, “Survival,” 53. 35. Ibid., 4, 45–47. 36.  Details of this trip are recounted in Sheikh Muzaffer Özak, The Unveiling of Love: Sufism and the Remembrance of God (New York: Pir Press, 2001), 16–21. 37.  See Tosun Bayrak, Memoirs of a Moth: The Life of Shaykh Tosun al Jerrahi (Istanbul: Timas Publishing, 2014), 258. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 72–75, 84–104. 40. Ibid., 109. 41. Ibid., 108–26 (quote from 126).



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42.  Robert Frager, Love is the Wine (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1987). 43. Trimingham, Sufi Orders, 74. 44. Bayrak, Memoirs, 126–27. 45.  See Bob Colacello, “Remains of the Dia,” Vanity Fair online, September 1996 (accessed November 7, 2009), http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/09/colacello 199609. 46.  On the Menils’ patronage and religiosity, see Pamela G. Smart, Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 47.  Quoted in Brad Gooch, Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 342. 48.  The history of Sufi performances at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine was relayed to the author by the Reverend James Park Morton, who was in residence at the Cathedral during the 1970s and 1980s. Personal interview with the author, November 3, 2010. 49. Özak, Unveiling, 19. 50.  Colacello, “Remains.” 51. Ibid. 52.  Among Lex Hixon’s many books are Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, [1978] 1995), in which he invites the reader (in the words of Ken Wilber, who wrote the foreword) to “release yourself into Spirit as it manifests itself through each of these traditions” (viii). 53.  According to Hixon’s website, the interview occurred in 1979; see Lex Hixon, “Radio,” LexHixon, accessed January 10, 2008, http://www.lexhixon.org/simplesite/sim plefrm.html. But Muzaffer elsewhere describes it as having occurred during his first visit to the United States in 1978; see Özak, Unveiling, 21. 54.  Lex Hixon Nur al-Jerrahi, Atom from the Sun of Knowledge (Westport, CT: Pir Press, 1993), v–vi. 55.  As recounted in Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 9–11. 56. Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, xi. 57.  See Gooch, Godtalk, 352–53. 58.  According to the Nur-Ashki Jerrahis’ website, Nur’s “vision of Universal Islam opens a new era of spiritual flowering”; see “Lineage,” Nur Ashki Jerrahi, accessed January 10, 2008, http://nurashkijerrahi.org/lineage. In contrast, Bayrak’s Halveti-Jerrahi’s define themselves as “A Traditional Muslim Sufi Order,” using the words “Traditional” and “Muslim” to distinguish their order from the Nur-Ashki Jerrahis; see “About Us,” Jerrahi Order of America, accessed January 10, 2008, http://www.jerrahi.org/. Thanks to Michael Wolfe for directing me to these websites and the communication between the groups. 59. Gooch, Godtalk, 348. 60. Ibid., 346. 61.  Quoted in Colacello, “Remains.”

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62.  As told by members of both orders to Michael Wolfe in 2005. Michael Wolfe, “Invitation and Education: How Two American Branches of a Turkish Sufi Order Use the Internet to Educate Newcomers,” Unpublished paper for Columbia University, New York, 2005. 63. Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, xii. 64.  Rauf, quoted in “Abraham’s Children.” 65. Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, xv. 66.  Ibid., xii (emphasis added). 67.  Ibid., xiii. 68.  Ibid., xvi–xvii. 69. Ibid., 65. 70. Ibid., 89. 71. Ibid.,114–15. On the Sufi psychology genre, see Hermansen, “Literary Productions,” 28–48. 72. Ibid., 114. In his writings, Rauf discussed all four Sunni law schools and the importance of finding commonality between them, if possible. He did not, as some black American Muslims have proposed, advocate creating a new body of law to fit particularly American circumstances. On the latter subject, see Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo, “The Fiqh Councilor in North America,” in Muslims on the Americanization Path, edited by Yvonne Haddad and John L. Esposito (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 79–106 and Sherman Jackson, “Shari‘ah, Democracy and the Modern Nation-State: Some Reflections on Islam, Popular Rule and Pluralism,” Fordham International Law Journal 27, no. 1 (2004): 88–107. 73.  On Rauf ’s idea to invite the Prime Minister to the meetings, see Islam: A Sacred Law, 15. 74. Ibid., 22 (emphasis added). See 119 for the “Spirit and intent of the Shariah.” 75. Ibid., 20. 76. Ibid., 44–45, 60. 77. Ibid., 108–9. 78. Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, 88. 79. Rauf, Islam: A Sacred Law, 109–10. In the following paragraph, Rauf also applied this reasoning to the interpretation of shari‘ah: “As you go down the sources and examine the totality of Islamic laws and trace them back to any of the eleven sources from which they originated, it is sensible to consider those that originated from custom ‘more subject to evolution’ than those that originated from the Qur’ān.” 80. Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, 32. 81.  As recounted to Brad Gooch in 2000; see Godtalk, 356. 82. Ibid. 83.  American Sufi Muslim Association, “Certificate of Incorporation of American Sufi Muslim Association under Section 803 of the Non-For-Profit Corporation Law,” filed with the New York Department of State on June 10, 1997, 2. 84.  Personal interview with Daisy Khan, January 25, 2008. 85.  American Sufi Muslim Association, “Certificate of Incorporation,” 2.



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86.  See Gooch, Godtalk, 356. 87.  Information on and interviews with Hisham Kabbani can be found in GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam, 355–56 and in Paul Barrett, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York: Picador Books, 2008), 179–215. 88.  See Ron Geaves, “Who Defines Moderate Islam ‘Post’-September 11?,” in Islam and the West, Post 9/11, edited by Ron Geaves, Yvonne Haddad, and Jane Idelman Smith (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 67. As Geaves notes, this State Department tactic also derived from observing the Indian government’s practices in dealing with various Muslim communities on the subcontinent. 89.  According to Dr. Ahmad Kostas—a Moroccan Fulbright Scholar who helped to organize the annual World Sacred Music Festival that Rauf attended in 1996 and who belonged to the same order that Rauf joined that year—he and Rauf had once shared the same goals but eventually parted company because Rauf insisted on keeping Sufi practices tied to mosques while Kostas insisted that American mosques were all “infected” with extremism and should be avoided. Personal conversation with Ahmed Kostas, Princeton, New Jersey, March 10, 2007. Details on Kostas’ Sufi activities and Fulbright fellowship can be found at his page on the Washington Morocco Club website, accessed January 10, 2008, http://www.washingtonmoroccanclub.org/Ahmed%20Kostas.htm (site discontinued), as well as on his page on the website of the US branch of the Qadiri Butshishia order, “More About Sidi Ahmed Kostas,” accessed August 6, 2011, http://web .archive.org/web/20030408081844/http://www.sufivillage.org/kostas2.html. 90.  The attitudes of Muzaffer and Nasr were in some ways quite similar, as Nasr indicated in Nasr’s preface to the translation of Muzaffer Özak, Irshad: Wisdom of a Sufi Master (Westport, CT: Pir Press, 1988). 91.  In his first book, for example, Rauf argued that Qur’anic recitation has a “dual effect” on listeners: “a visceral, emotive, intuitive effect much like the effect of music or art . . . like a call of the wild to the depths of one’s soul . . . [and] a linear, intellectual leftbrain one”; see Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, 14. 92.  For information about the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood and its founder, Shaykh Tawfiq, see http://www.mosqueofislamicbrotherhoodinc.org/aboutus.html and http://www.mosqueofislamicbrotherhoodinc.org/shaykyhtawfiq.html, accessed February 18, 2007 (sites discontinued). 93.  On Sirraj Wahhaj, a charismatic speaker who often travels the country raising money for various Muslim causes and who a former Wall Street Journal reporter describes as “a rare crossover luminary, an African-American popular among immigrant Muslims,” see Barrett, American Islam, 100–133. 94.  Matthew Weiner, “Interfaith in the City: Religious Pluralism and Civil Society in New York,” PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 2009, 81. 95.  Quote from Ari L. Goldman, “Religion Notes: Fighting Evil,” New York Times, January 2, 1993. On the “trialogue” and tri-faith battle (along with a local Protestant minister and a rabbi) against Time Warner, see Dennis Hevesi, “An Emergency Forges a Bond of Tenants in a Common Faith,” New York Times, November 9, 1994, and Nadine Brozan, “Manhattan Cable to Drop Channel with Religious Shows,” New York Times,

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January 24, 1999. As Times reporter Edward Wong described in “Making it Work: A Chaplain Who Focuses on Hope, Inside and Outside of Prison,” July 26, 1998, Abdur Rashid began speaking in prisons after a member of his mosque was arrested in 1976, was officially hired as a chaplain at Sing Sing in 1986, transferredf to Rikers Island in 1997, and then transferred to the downtown Manhattan Detention Complex after that. 96.  Chris Hedges, “A Muslim in the Middle Hopes Against Hope,” New York Times, June 23, 2004. 97.  On “moderate Islam,” see Hedges, “Muslim in the Middle.” In addition to being described as the founder of the American Sufi Muslim Association, Rauf was identified as a “Sufi leader” connected to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright in a 2006 article reviewing one of Albright’s books; see Peter Steinfels, “Madeline Albright, the Cardinal?,” New York Times, May 6, 2006.

Chapter 4 1.  Details and quotes are drawn from Hisham Aidi’s recounting of the event, “The Milder, Gentler Side of Islam,” ASMA Society, “Past Events (2004),” accessed December 17, 2009, http://www.asmasociety.org/calendar/pastevents.html. 2.  Aidi, “Milder, Gentler Side.” 3.  Information about this event is drawn from “Cordoba Bread Fest: Children of Abraham Break Bread Together,” Cordoba Initiative, accessed September 8, 2006, http:// www.cordobainitiative.org/recent_programs.html (site discontinued). 4.  For more on the Cordoba Bread Fest, see the Introduction. 5.  “Cordoba Bread Fest: Children of Abraham Break Bread Together.” 6.  According to Bennett, he and Rauf initially met at an August 2002 Spiritual Paths Foundation seminar held at the Aspen Institute in Colorado; “Finding Cordoba,” April 25, 2004 (accessed December 17, 2009), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/ s1091176.html (site discontinued). After four terms as mayor of the city of Aspen (1991– 1999), Bennett held a two-year position as vice president of the Aspen Institute, a “nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute,” from 1999–2001. In 2010, the Aspen Institute included former Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger among their “Lifetime Trustees” (Aspen Institute, accessed February 3, 2010, http://www.aspeninstitute.org/about/leader ship-board/lifetime-trustees) and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ann McLaughlin Korologos (among other academic and business elites) on the Board of Trustees; see “Leadership,” Aspen Institute, accessed February 3, 2010, http://www.aspeninstitute.org/about/leadership. 7.  Rauf thanked Bennett for his editorial help in “weaving the Initiative’s ideas” into the book’s “architecture” in What’s Right with Islam, 286. 8.  Rauf taught the course in conjunction with St. Bartholomew’s Center for Religious Inquiry. Asia Society Annual Report, 2002–2003, 1.9, Asia Society, accessed February 22, 2008, http://www.asiasociety.org/about/annualreports/ASAR_02–03_pt1.pdf (site discontinued). 9.  Quoted in “Abraham’s Children.”



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10.  Daisy Khan, “Faith and Feminism Brown Bag Lunch,” lecture at The Sister Fund, New York, January 3, 2008. 11.  All quotes in this section derive from the “Mission” section under “About Us,” ASMA Society, accessed January 4, 2008, http://www.asmasociety.org/about/index.html. 12.  Rauf, “Forceful Voice of Reason,” 100. Rauf discussed Herberg explicitly in What’s Right with Islam, 224–27. 13.  Information on Bennett’s role with the Garrison Institute is drawn from the 2006 Cordoba Initiative website, accessed September 8, 2006, http://www.cordobaini tiative.org/who_we_are.html (site discontinued). 14.  Rauf ’s political liberalism should not be understood as a partisan position. Rather, as I discuss in Chapter 1, his liberalism reflects the classical political and market liberalism to which both major political parties in the United States appeal. 15.  “About Us,” ASMA Society, accessed January 4, 2008, http://www.asmasociety .org/about/index.html (emphasis added). 16.  Material on the Cordoba Initiative was initially located on a specific Cordoba Initiative page on ASMA Society, accessed February 1, 2006, http://www.asmasociety .org/cordoba/index.html (site discontinued). 17.  See Cordoba Initiative, “Bylaws of the Cordoba Initiative,” filed with the Colorado Secretary of State on June 14, 2004. 18.  See “Julia A. Jitkoff, Sculptor, is Married to B. Waring Partridge 3d, Executive,” New York Times, June 3, 1991. 19.  Bennett’s biography remained available on the ASMA Society website until 2007, accessed February 1, 2006, http://www.asmasociety.org/about/b_bennett.html. 20.  Khan’s biographical details are drawn from “Daisy Khan,” ASMA Society, 2009 (accessed March 18, 2010), http://www.asmasociety.org/about/b_dkhan.html. 21.  Timothy McFlynn, Public Counsel of the Rockies, “Supplementary Letter to the Internal Revenue Service,” September 14, 2004. 22.  Personal communication with Chris King, February 3, 2006. 23.  Cheryl Benard, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2003). 24. Ibid., 46; see also xii, 63, 64. 25.  Angela Rebasa, Cheryl Benard, Lowell H. Schwartz, and Peter Sickle, Building Moderate Muslim Networks (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2007), 74; see also 89–90 on involving moderate American Muslim organizations in cultivating moderates worldwide. 26.  On the “West and Islam Dialogue” and its aims, participants, and funders, see World Economic Forum, accessed July 6, 2009, http://www.weforum.org/en/Communi ties/FaithCommunities/c100/index.htm (site discontinued). Rauf noted his involvement in the World Economic Forum and his appointment to the Council of 100 in several biographies, including on the jacket of his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam. 27.  Madeline K. Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 283–87. Their Council on

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Foreign Relations taskforce findings were later published in Madeline K. Albright, Vin Weber and Steven Cook, In Support of Arab Democracy (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2006). 28.  “Annual Meeting 2006: The Creative Imperative,” World Economic Forum, accessed July 6, 2009, http://www.weforum.org/en/events/ArchivedEvents/annualmeeting /index.htm (site discontinued). 29.  Personal communication with Daisy Khan, September 15, 2006. Rauf described his connections with Badawi and Badawi’s role in convening that meeting in “Seven Questions: the Cross and the Crescent: An Interview with Faisal Abdul Rauf,” Foreign Policy online, September 20, 2006 (accessed April 8, 2014), http://foreignpolicy.com /2006/09/20/seven-questions-the-cross-and-the-crescent/. 30.  Glen Kessler, “Karen Hughes, Changing Public Diplomacy’s Face,” Washington Post, April 19, 2006. 31.  Rauf ’s comments can be found in “Seven Questions.” 32.  This primary objective, labeled “Issue & Policy Research,” appeared first under the list of Cordoba’s “Principal Programs” on its initial webpage, accessed February 1, 2006, http://www.asmasociety.org/cordoba/programs/html (site discontinued). Cordoba’s other three programs listed at that time included “The Dialogues” (a series of talks to cultivate interreligious and civic understanding), “The American Muslim Initiatives” (including the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow Program, as well as two signature initiatives that Cordoba and ASMA would launch in 2006: “The American Muslim Women’s Forum” and “The Shariah Project”) and “Culture and Educational Programs.” 33.  Faiz Khan, “E.R. Doctor and Seeker of Islamic Truths,” in Voices of American Muslims, edited by Linda Brandi Cateura (New York: Hippocrene, 2005), 79. 34. Ibid., 72. 35. Ibid., 71–77. 36. Ibid., 76 and 79, respectively. 37. Ibid., 70. 38. Ibid., 73. 39. Ibid., 73. 40. Ibid., 77. 41. Ibid., 79. 42.  Faiz Khan, “American Muslims and 9/11 Truth: the Paralysis of Discourse, the Incompetence of Academia, and the Need for an Accurate Diagnosis,” in 9/11 and American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out, edited by Kevin Barrett, John Cobb, Jr., and Sandra Lubarsky (Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2007), 243. 43.  See Hedges, “Muslim in the Middle” and Sam Stein, “‘Ground Zero Mosque.’” 44.  Khan, “American Muslims,” 221. 45. Ibid., 226 and 244, respectively. 46. Ibid., 222 and 227, respectively. 47. Ibid., 241. 48. Ibid., 240. 49. Ibid., 250.



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50.  Khan, “E.R. Doctor,” 77. 51.  Jamie McIntyre, “Pentagon: Rumsfeld Misspoke on Flight 93 Crash,” CNN online, December 27, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/27/rumsfeld.flt93/. 52.  Maureen Dowd, “Repent, Dick Cheney,” New York Times, March 5, 2013. 53.  Personal interview, May 4, 2007. 54.  Personal communication with Danish Masood, September 12, 2010. 55.  On Rauf ’s message at the first Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT) conference, see ASMA’s early coverage of the event, accessed September 8, 2006, at http://asmasociety.org/religion/mlt_04retreat.html. The second MLT conference was in Copenhagen in 2006, information for which could be found on Cordoba’s website, accessed February 8, 2008, http://www.cordobainitiative.org/recent_programs.html, and the third in Doha in 2009 with sponsorship from the United Nations “Alliance of Civilizations” program; see Rushda Majeed, “300 Young Muslim Leaders from 75 Countries Set the Agenda for Positive Change,” ASMA Society Press Release, December 17, 2008. As of 2015, the “Young Leaders” (formerly, Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow) section of ASMA’s website, accessed May 2, 2015, http://www.muslimleadersoftomorrow.org/, was no longer operative. 56.  The initial description of WISE could be found on the 2006 iteration of “Cordoba Initiative: Principal Programs,” ASMA Society, accessed February 1, 2006, http:// www.asmasociety.org/cordoba/programs.html. By the November 2006 conference, Khan had gathered “150 Muslim women from 25 nations . . . to accelerate the leadership of Muslim women and empower them as bridge builders and change agents” (accessed February 8, 2008, http://www.cordobainitiative.org/recent_programs.html). Not long after, she began to petition US foundations for funds to create a legal training program for Muslim women. 57.  The initial Shariah Project description is drawn from the 2006 iteration of “Cordoba Initiative: Principal Programs,” ASMA Society, accessed February 1, 2006, http:// www.asmasociety.org/cordoba/programs.html. Rauf later changed the name of the program to the “Shariah Index Project.” He explained its purpose in Moving the Mountain, 17. 58.  Information on the Sister Fund and Hunt was found at Sister Fund, accessed March 18, 2010, http://www.sisterfund.org/about/sister-fund-mission-statement (site discontinued); and at Hunt Alternatives Fund, accessed March 18, 2010, http://www .huntalternatives.org/pages/71_mission_history.cfm (site discontinued), an organization established by Helen LaKelly Hunt and her sister, Ambassador Swanee Hunt, in 1981; and can still be found in Helen LaKelly Hunt, Faith and Feminism: A Holy Alliance (New York: Atria Books, 2004). The Global Fund for Women granted their 2006 donation under their “Expanding Civic and Political Participation” program, a listing for which may be found in the Fund’s grant database at Global Fund for Women, accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.glo balfundforwomen.org/what-we-do/our-grantmaking. The Sister Fund does not make its grantmaking history public but has supported ASMA since 2005. 59.  Daisy Khan provided this description of the inaugural WISE event, which ran from November 17–19, in a widely distributed press release that appeared on the website of The American Muslim (TAM), accessed December 14, 2007, http://theamerican

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muslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/muslim_women_leaders_launch_global_move ment_to_empower_muslim_women/0011550. 60.  “Grants and Grantees” database, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, accessed February 8, 2008, http://www.rbf.org/grant/11331/american-society-muslim-advancement-0 (site discontinued) and June 6, 2012, http://www.rbf.org/grant/11329/cordoba-initia tive (site discontinued). On the latter date, ASMA’s name was changed on grant records to “the American Society for Muslim Advancement.” 61.  According to their grants database, the Luce Foundation gave ASMA a onetime planning grant in 2009 in the amount of $150,000 for Khan’s expanded project to “develop a graduate program in Islamic law for Muslim women” and another two-year grant for the program in 2011 in the amount of $210,000; see “Theology Program Recent Grants,” Henry Luce Foundation, accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.hluce.org/theology recentgrants.aspx. 62. In 2007, Khan received a $60,000 fellowship award for “Racial Justice” with the Prime Movers program of the Hunt Alternative Fund. Although ASMA does not deal with issues of race, specifically, that year’s “Women’s Rights” fellowship had already been granted to Zainab Salib of Women for Women International; see “Our Fellows,” Prime Movers, accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.prime-movers.net/our-fellows/. Then, in 2008, the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded ASMA a grant of $300,000 for media outreach; see “American Society for Muslim Advancement” on “Grants Database,” Carnegie Corporation of New York, accessed June 6, 2012, http://carnegie.org/ grants/grants-database/. By 2008, the ASMA Society’s institutional sponsors included, in the order listed on their website, the “Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers [Fund], Rockefeller Philanthropy [Advisors] . . . Global Fund for Women, William and Mary Greeve Foundation, the Sister Fund, the Danny Kaye & Sylvia Fine Foundation, the Graham Charitable Foundation, the Derek (sic) Family Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation, The Ms. Foundation, and Hunt Alternatives”; see “About Us: Our Supporters,” ASMA Society, accessed January 3, 2008, http://www.asmasociety.org/ about/p_support.html. ASMA’s acknowledgement of the “Derek” Family Foundation is likely a typo and meant to reflect funding from the Deak Family Foundation, with which Robert Leslie Deak—a security analyst, collaborator with, and donor to ASMA and Cordoba—is affiliated. After the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, Rauf became embroiled in a lawsuit with Deak over allegations of mismanaged and unreported funds, including the millions of dollars in support that the Cordoba Initiative had received from the Malaysian government; see Ariel Kaminer, “Ex-Leader of Planned Mosque Near Ground Zero Settles Suit with Donor,” New York Times, June 7, 2013. 63.  T. S. M. Mohammed, Esquire, “Certificate of Amendment to the Certificate of Incorporation of American Sufi Muslim Association,” filed with the State of New York Department of State, November 8, 2006. 64.  Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Washington, DC, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as “a Muslim civil liberties and ad-



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vocacy group” that participates in inter-religious endeavors, particularly ones centered on human rights; see “CAIR at a Glance,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, accessed February 8, 2008, http://www.cair.com/AboutUs/CAIRataGlance.aspx. A revised website with a slightly updated description, accessed May 13, 2016, is available at http:// www.cair.com/about-us/cair-at-a-glance.html. 65.  Others included actor Richard Gere, president of Healing the Divide and chairman of the board of the International Campaign for Tibet, Dr. Mohammad El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and “Spiritual Leader and Humanitarian” H. H. Sri Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi. 66.  Hedges “Muslim in the Middle.” 67.  Rauf, “In God We Trust,” 97 and 99, respectively. 68.  Advisory Board members were listed on the Cordoba Initiative website, accessed December 20, 2007, http://www.cordobainitiative.org/board.html. 69.  All material for this section was derived from “About Us,” Cordoba Initiative, accessed September 8, 2006, http://www.cordobainitiative.org/ (emphasis added). 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72.  Ibid., emphasis added. 73.  US-Muslim Engagement Project, Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S.Muslim Relations (Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA: Search for Common Ground and the Consensus Building Institute, 2009), 20. Details on the members of the Leadership Group—which also included former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, author and FranklinCovey co-founder Steven Covey, and Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the nation’s largest Muslim organization (the Islamic Society of North America), among others—can be found in the report’s Preface (ix–xi). 74.  Nasr discussed the group’s work in an interview with CNN’s Drew Griffith, CNN online, December 29, 2007 (accessed April 21, 2009), http://www.cnn.com/video/#/ video/bestoftv/2007/12/29/nasr.bhutto.killing.cnn?iref=videosearch (site discontinued). 75.  On private-sector led economic development, see US-Muslim Engagement Project, Changing Course, 20. 76.  “Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf,” under the “Staff Bios” section of “Who We Are,” Cordoba Initiative, accessed December 10, 2009, http://www.cordobainitiative.org/?q =content/staff-bios#Randy%20Benn (site discontinued) and Courtney Erwin, Secretary, “Amended and Restated Bylaws of the Cordoba Initiative, A Colorado Nonprofit Corporation,” filed with the Colorado Secretary of State, June 2, 2009. 77.  “Our Mission,” Cordoba Initiative, accessed December 10, 2009, http://www .cordobainitiative.org/?q=content/our-mission (site discontinued). 78.  Quote from the “Muslims in the U.S.—Isolated, Integrated, Assimilated?” report featured on “Selected Events 2007,” Consulate General of the United States in Dusseldorf, Germany, accessed January 10, 2008, http://duesseldorf.usconsulate.gov/dusseldorf /khan021407.html (site discontinued). As of 2009, ASMA also noted Khan’s trip on its calendar of events under “Daisy Khan’s Speaking Tour of Germany, Topics: Interfaith Relations, Assimilation, Identity, Activism,” ASMA Society, accessed July 6, 2009, http://

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www.asmasociety.org/calendar/index.html. The content of this site has since been revised. 79.  All quotes here are derived from Khan, “Faith and Feminism.” 80. Ibid. 81.  “About WISE,” Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, accessed October 7, 2010, http://www.wisemuslimwomen.org/about/. 82. “WISE ‫حول معلومات‬,” Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, accessed March 13, 2015, http://www.wisemuslimwomen.org/arabic/about/. 83.  Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 184. 84.  Personal interview, Daisy Khan, January 25, 2008. 85.  “Our Mission” and “Our History,” respectively, ASMA Society, accessed March 13, 2010, http://www.asmasociety.org/about/index.html. 86.  Daisy Khan, “Balancing Tradition and Pluralism,” Sojourners Magazine 38, no. 2 (February 2009): 15. Part of this essay derived from Daisy Khan, “Faith-Based Feminism: the Most Powerful Model,” which appeared on the now-defunct On Faith (blog), Newsweek-Washington Post, October 24, 2008 (accessed November 12, 2008), http:// newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/daisy_khan/2008/10/faith_based_feminism_ the_most.html (site discontinued). 87.  Daisy Khan, “Why the World was Rooting for Obama,” On Faith (blog), Newsweek-Washington Post, November 6, 2008 (accessed November 12, 2008), http://news week.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/daisy_khan/2008/11/why_the_world_was_rooting_ for.html (site discontinued). 88.  Personal interview with Feisal Abdul Rauf, April 26, 2008. 89.  Catherine Rampell, “The ‘Great Recession’: A Brief Etymology,” New York Times, March 11, 2009 and “The Recession Has (Officially) Ended,” New York Times, September 20, 2010, respectively. 90.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Obama’s Opportunity in Cairo,” On Faith (blog), NewsweekWashington Post, June 2, 2009 (accessed June 3, 2009), http://newsweek.washingtonpost .com/onfaith/panelists/feisal_abdul_rauf/2009/06/obamas_opportunity_in_cairo.html (site discontinued). 91. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, 152. 92. Ibid., 29. 93. Ibid., 6. 94. Ibid, 123–26, 144–45. 95. Ibid., 124–25. “While this does not explain all the causes of religious aggression, or aggression committed in the name of religion,” Rauf argued, “I believe that a significant portion of religious fundamentalism of the twentieth century (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh) was a result of this defensive reaction against perceived attack.” 96.  Zain Abdullah briefly describes the Malcolm Shabazz mosque in “West African ‘Soul Brothers’ in Harlem: Immigration, Islam, and the Black Encounter,” in Black Routes to Islam, edited by Manning Marable and Hisham D. Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 255–56. Hisham D. Aidi describes other black and Latino Muslim



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opinions about and efforts to compensate for economic inequality in “Jihadis in the Hood: Race, Urban Islam, and the War on Terror,” Black Routes to Islam, edited by Manning Marable and Hisham D. Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 288–89. On Siraj Wahhaj, see Barrett, American Islam, 100–133. 97. Barrett, American Islam, 126. 98.  Quoted in Barrett, American Islam, 131. 99.  See Chapters 1 and 2 for a discussion of neoliberalism in this context. On changes in American political economy, particularly as compared to other nation-state models, see Nancy Fraser, Justus Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Post-Socialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). 100.  See Patricia Cohen, “Public Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard,” New York Times, May 24, 2015. 101.  See the “History” section of “About Us,” Inner-City Muslim Action Network, accessed May 15, 2015, www.imancentral.org/about/. 102.  Quote from Sally Quinn, “Daisy Khan: ‘When will Muslims Be Accepted?,’” On Faith (blog), Newsweek-Washington Post, August 19, 2010 (accessed May 15, 2015), http:// www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2010/08/19/daisy-khan-when-will-muslims-be-accepted /3848 (site discontinued). 103.  “Is This the End for Obama’s ‘New Beginning’ Between the US and Muslims?,” Newsweek, September 10, 2010, http://www.newsweek.com/end-obamas-new-beginning -between-us-and-muslims-72209.

Chapter 5 1.  Rauf and Fariha, who owned the building, had some differences over Sufi practice. Among other things, Fariha allowed for a measure of democratic deliberation in her tariqa. Nevertheless, in deference to the shaykh she and Rauf once shared, Fariha allowed Rauf to serve as the mosque’s imam and accepted Rauf ’s dervishes as substitutes when he was away. For other differences, see Corbett, “Dhikr.” 2.  Personal communication, March 2, 2007. 3.  American liberalisms involve multiple strands of economic, social, and political philosophy that are beyond the scope of this chapter. Although there are diverse iterations of liberal philosophy, however, there are also common threads tying them together. As Talal Asad has argued, “Western liberal conceptions of person and politics” constitute a “value-space [that] provides its advocates with a common political and moral language,” even if those advocates disagree, to some extent, on the shape liberal polities should take. Individual sovereignty (essential to democratic politics) and toleration (constitutive of multiculturalism) are among the ideas central to that space; see Talal Asad, “Responses” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press 2006), 209–10. 4.  Personal interview with ‘Adli, June 15, 2007. 5.  Field notes, May 6, 2005. 6.  The “greater jihad” (jihad al-akbar, which stands in contrast to the “lesser” mili-

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tary jihad), is a theme in classical Islamic texts that has taken on new resonance in the last few centuries. This distinction predates the modern period but became newly salient in the strategies of Sufi orders that fought various colonial forces. For how practices of tasawwuf occupied changing places in nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates about civic and political action, including greater and lesser jihads, see Juliane Hammer, “The Soul of Islam: Writing and Publishing as Engaged Sufism,” Journal for Islamic Studies 26 (2006): 36–70 and Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis, 27–53. 7.  Rauf ’s dervishes were hardly alone in extolling multiculturalism and emphasizing the need to overcome differences. Markus Dressler has demonstrated that, while several New York City Sufi orders are ethnically exclusive, dervishes do cross between them (and between Sunni and Shi‘i tariqas) and are sometimes members of multiple communities; see “Pluralism and Authenticity: Sufi Paths in Post-9/11 New York” in Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality, edited by Markus Dressler, Ron Geaves, and Gritt M. Klinkhammer (London: Routledge, 2013), 77–96. Marcia Hermansen likewise argues that boundaries between American Sufi groups have become more fluid in recent decades; see “What’s American about American Sufi Movements?,” in Sufism in Europe and North America, edited by David Westerlund (New York: Routledge Corizon, 2004), 38. 8.  According to one MUSNY focus group facilitator, the three phases of the research project involved canvassing New York neighborhoods and mapping the existence of mosques, interviewing Muslim leaders and elites, and conducting ninety-minute focus group interviews with lay practitioners; Sufi Focus Group Interview II, MUSNY Project, June 2, 2003. In what follows, I rely on material from the third phase. 9.  Personal communication with MUSNY research director Louis Cristillo, March 4, 2008. 10.  In conducting fieldwork at Masjid al-Farah, I interacted with and interviewed members of Rauf ’s Sufi group, members of Shaykha Fariha’s group, Sufis who attended both groups’ dhikr meetings, and attendees of Friday services who did not belong to either. But I focused mainly on the dervishes most closely associated with Rauf from 2004 to 2010. 11.  Field notes, March 30, 2007. 12.  Field notes, November 4, 2004. 13. Turner, Islam, 13. 14.  Personal communication, October 21, 2005. 15.  Personal interviews with Brother Malik, February 16 and 23, 2007. 16.  Information about Pedram is drawn from my own interviews and observations, as well as from his interviews with a journalist who visited the mosque and dhikr group in 2000; see Gooch, Godtalk, 293. 17.  Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity is edited by M. Ali Lakhani, who founded Sacred Web Publishing (which produces the journal) in Vancouver, Canada, in 1995; see William Stoddart, Introduction to The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom by M. Ali Lakhani (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2010), xiii–xxi. 18.  Personal communication, January 12, 2006.



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19.  Personal communication, September 15, 2006. 20.  Field notes, September 8, 2006. 21.  Nasr argued that “the most essential division within Islam is the ‘vertical’ hierarchy of the Sacred Law (Sharīah), the Way (Tarīqah) and the Truth (Haqīqah), the first being the exoteric aspect of the Islamic revelation, divided into the Sunni and the Shī‘ite interpretations of the tradition and the latter two the esoteric aspects which are usually known under the denomination of Sufism”; An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 18. Similarly, Rauf explained in his first book that “Muslims regard the outer expression . . . as being the domain of the law (Sharī‘ah) and the inner expression as the spiritual path (tarīqah) which must be internally realized to attain spiritual maturity”; Rauf, Islam: A Search for Meaning, 89. 22.  As Rauf described it to worshippers in 2007, “‘ilm al-batin,’ inner knowledge, esoteric knowledge, was a province of what later began to be known as tasawwuf ” (March 30, 2007). 23.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, Introduction to The Universal Spirit of Islam, by Judith Fitzgerald and Michael Oren Fitzgerald (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Press, 2006), xv. 24.  Ibid., xvi. 25.  As translated by Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Multiculturalisms: Western, Muslim, and Future,” Cross Currents 55, no.1 (Spring 2005): 105. 26.  Personal interview with ‘Abd al-Raheem, February 9, 2007. 27.  Personal interview with ‘Adli, June 15, 2007. 28.  As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, attributing conflict to “cultural” or even religious difference alone—as in the so-called Clash of Civilizations thesis, according to which Muslims and Christians are inherently at war—elides the political factors (such as colonialism, imperialism, and neo-imperialism) directly responsible for creating conflicts. Engaging in such culture talk allows individuals and nation-states to deny that their actions, choices, and—in the case of governments—foreign and domestic policy decisions have anything to do with creating national or international tensions; see Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 15–36. 29.  For an illuminating history of how concerns about cultural difference have been entangled with colonialism, imperialist projects, apartheid regimes, and international rivalries, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 30.  On these issues, see Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican. 31.  Field notes, September 23, 2005. 32.  African American Focus Group Interview 1, MUSNY Project, July 13, 2000. 33.  African American Focus Group Interview 2, MUSNY Project, May 23, 2003. 34.  Sufi Focus Group Interview 1, MUSNY Project, September 12, 2000. 35. Ibid. 36.  Those who were aware of these issues tended to be affiliated with Islam for a longer period of time and affiliated with Muslims from less affluent socio-economic backgrounds. Such was the case with two of my interviewees of different genders, one

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of whom had worked with Muslims in New York correctional facilities and the other of whom was a community college instructor and single mother. 37.  Andrea Elliot, “Between Black and Immigrant Muslims: An Uneasy Alliance,” New York Times, March 11, 2007. 38.  Field notes, March 16, 2007. 39.  For MANA’s purpose and history, see Karen Leonard, “Finding a Place in the Nation,” in Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants, edited by Pierette HondagneuSotelo (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 54–55. 40.  Field notes, March 16, 2007. 41.  Sufi Focus Group Interview I, MUSNY Project, September 12, 2000. 42.  Ibid. Columbia University researchers translated adab as “etiquette” in transcripts of these interviews, ‘urf as “tradition,” and akhlaq as “morality.” As I argue here, though, that choice is one often conditioned by particular racial and economic experiences. The word adab has a variety of meanings that have changed over time and context. As Gerhard Böwering has noted, ‘urf and adab were both used at one time to convey the notion of “custom” or “customary law” (depending on the relation of the words to others within larger conceptual frameworks), while akhlaq and adab were used to convey ethical and moral action. To complicate things further, as Böwering explained, adab is also the modern Arabic word for literature, reflecting the term’s early usage in connection with both Persian moral thought and Greek philosophy; see Gerhard Böwering, “The Adab Literature of Classical Sufism: Ansari’s Code of Conduct,” in Moral Conduct and Authority, The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, edited by Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 62–66. 43.  Sufi Focus Group Interview I. 44.  See Ira Lapidus, “Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Concept of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam,” and Barbara Daly Metcalf, “Introduction,” both in Moral Conduct and Authority, edited by Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 39 and 4, respectively. As these authors point out, Sufis were not alone in compiling adab manuals but have historically outnumbered other authors of such literature. 45.  Böwering, “Adab Literature,” 62–87. 46.  See Lapidus, “Knowledge, Virtue, and Action,” 50–51 and Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 47.  According to Ebrahim Moosa, classical Islamic traditions of subjectivity position the individual as one who takes shape only in relation to other persons; see Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 221, 224–32. Both Moosa and Lapidus argue that adab is not only a matter of codes of conduct, but is also part of the overarching intersubjective process that governs the formation of the self; see Lapidus, “Knowledge, Virtue, and Action,” 59–60. 48. Ernst, Shambhala Guide, 211. See also Qumar al-Huda, “The Light Beyond the Shore in the Theology of Proper Sufi Moral Conduct (Adab),” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 2 (June 2004): 461–84.



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49.  “Community Life and Adab” on “Invitation to Union,” Nur-Ashki Jerrahi, accessed April 18, 2008, http://www.nurashkijerrahi.org/union.htm. 50.  Wolfe, “Invitation and Education.” 51.  Field notes, March 16, 2007. 52.  Field notes, November 10, 2006. 53.  Personal interview with Charley, February 21, 2007. 54.  Personal communication, May 11, 2007. 55. Ibid. 56.  Quoted in Elliot, “Between Black and Immigrant.” 57.  Field notes, December 1, 2006. 58.  One of the most detailed accounts of the New York Police Department’s extensive surveillance campaigns—which, while undertaken for nearly a decade, resulted in uncovering zero terror plots—can be found in Matt Appuzzo and Adam Goldman, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

Chapter 6 1.  In the statement, Rauf and Lord Carey criticized the media for republishing cartoons from a Danish children’s book depicting the Prophet as a terrorist. The full text was available on the website of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, accessed February 3, 2008, http://www.tanenbaum.org/voices_for_peace.html (site discontinued). 2.  Field notes, February 3, 2006. 3.  See Marr, Cultural Roots and McAlister, Epic Encounters. 4.  On saving Muslim women, see Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. On Oprah Winfrey, see McAlister, Epic Encounters, 281–82. 5.  Field notes, Sister Fund “Faith and Feminism” meeting, April 27, 2006. 6.  Personal communication, June 6, 2007. 7.  Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 229. 8.  Field notes, March 9, 2007. 9.  Although issues of male-female relations and the rights of women, as my interlocutors understood them, are the primary subjects of this chapter, it is important to note that gender was a more fluid (though not greatly) identity in my fieldwork than such a dualistic framing can capture. For example, as with many communities that observe gender separations of some kind, there was a great deal of homosocial behavior among young men who would have identified as heterosexual, if asked, but who did not exhibit many of the assertive attitudes associated with masculinity in the United States. There were also observant gay Muslims who attended the mosque. Although sexuality was rarely a topic of conversation, and the gay Muslim who attended most frequently professed a life of celibacy, several of Rauf ’s closest dervishes tacitly accepted his sexual orientation. For his part, Rauf maintained that wanton sexuality was a matter of concern, but not necessarily homosexuality. As Rauf told WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer in

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2012 (quoting President Obama), his views on the subject were “evolving”; see “Beyond Ground Zero,” Brian Lehrer Show, May 11, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/story/208230beyond-ground-zero/. On gay Muslim Americans and some of the issues they face, see Afzal, Lone Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and the South Asian Experience in Texas (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 124–51, as well as Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 10.  See Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, 54–112 and Juliane Hammer, “Studying American Muslim Women: Gender, Feminism, and Islam,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, edited by Juliane Hammer and Omid Safi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 330–44. 11.  Janet Jakobsen discusses these coalitions in Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998). Challenges to western feminism arose alongside the development of postcolonial studies with collaborations such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) and M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997). 12.  Clara Connolly, “Washing Our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism,” Women Against Fundamentalism no. 1 (1990): 5–7. The journal was published from 1990–1996 and featured the work of notable postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. 13.  The idea that every religion has fundamentalists or is prone to fundamentalism is a very recent one, popularized in the 1970s by academics and politicians, as demonstrated by Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt, Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), as well as David Harrington Watt, The Antifundamentalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming); see also Corbett, “Islamic ‘Fundamentalism.’” 14.  WAF was founded, in part, by Southhall Black Sisters, a British organization of women of African and Asian descent who were accused of “washing their dirty laundry” in public when their demands for attention to women’s issues supposedly threatened the unity of British antiracism coalitions between black and Asian communities. Established in 1980, the Southhall Black Sisters stood at the nexus of several mainstream liberation movements (e.g., antiracism and antisexism) and yet as insiders of none. Some of this history is recounted in Gabriele Griffin, “The Struggle Continues—an Interview with Hannana Siddiqui of Southhall Black Sisters,” in Feminist Activism in the 1990s, edited by Gabriele Griffin (Abingdon, U.K.: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 79–89. Some postcolonial feminists have seen WAF as a model for creating multicultural alliances because the organization involved women from religious minority groups and because they argued that fundamentalism occurs in every religion, including Christianity. Thus, WAF’s politics appear to be absent of racial and religious biases; see, for example, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Introduction to Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and



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Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 23–27. Yet, because crosscultural use of the term “fundamentalism” (a term that is indigenous to American Protestant history) to describe religions other than Protestant Christianity is the direct result of neoimperial politics and discourses, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse pointed out in an article in WAF’s journal, this is a rather ironic argument for postcolonial feminists to make. 15.  For analysis of and debates over such projects, see the essays in Gisela Webb, Windows of Faith: Muslim Women’s Scholar-Activists in North America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000) and Juliane Hammer, American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 16.  For discussions of these issues, see Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 17.  Hishaam D. Aidi, in addition to Rouse, describes how failures of American liberalism to translate into economic and social gains, particularly in inner cities plagued by state withdrawal as well as deindustrialization and white and middle-class flight, has coincided with an increase in emphasis on “traditional” (nuclear) family structures and on complementary gender roles; see “Jihadis,” 288. 18.  Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith, and Kathleen M. Moore, Muslim Women in America: the Challenge of Islamic Identity Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 122–23. On Mattson’s position, see also Hammer, American Muslim Women, 127–29. 19.  “History,” Women in Islam, accessed December 16, 2013, http://www.womeninislam.org/about.html (site discontinued) and “Building Civic Participation and Interfaith Collaboration” Women in Islam, accessed December 16, 2013, http://www.women inislam.org/subprograms4.htm (site discontinued). 20.  Women in Islam and Islamic Social Services Associations, Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage (New York: Women in Islam, 2005). 21.  For a brief analysis of WISE see Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, 180–86 and Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country, 323–24. 22. Rauf, What’s Right with Islam, xviii and Moving the Mountain, 24, 107–34. 23.  All quotes from Deborah are derived from our interview at her home on June 14, 2007. 24.  Max Doms and Ethan Lewis, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, “The Narrowing of the Male-Female Wage Gap,” FRSB Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, June 29, 2007, accessed December 19, 2013, http://www.frbsf.org/eco nomic-research/publications/economic-letter/2007/june/narrowing-male-female-wage -gap/. 25.  On December 16, 2013, New York State Senator Jeff Klein acknowledged the crisis of inaccessible childcare. Due to the challenges working women face in finding af-

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fordable care, particularly in New York City, Klein said, the legislature was working on plans to reintroduce a childcare subsidy. As of 2016, they had yet to do this; “Anthony Shorris; Reasons to Love NY; NYS Senate,” Brian Lehrer Show, December 16, 2013, http:// www.wnyc.org/story/the-brian-lehrer-show-2013-12-16/. 26.  This tendency to perform “traditional” gender roles at home is true of both women and men in “gender-atypical” occupations; Daniel Schneider, “Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation,” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 4 (January 2012): 1029–72. 27.  For women raised as Christians, this often had to do with the Trinity—the Christian doctrine that there is only one God but in three parts: father, son (Jesus), and holy spirit. Many converts conveyed their inability to reconcile Christianity’s professed monotheism with this three-part idea and their greater comfort with the Islamic doctrine of monotheism, in which God is just one and Jesus is a revered prophet. 28.  Deborah made this comparison to images of Saudi Arabian Islam, which she believed had caused her to misunderstand the tradition and had dissuaded her from converting. However, Emily also echoed the distinction between the Islam she associated with Saudi Arabia (and believed she had experienced at another mosque in the city) and the faith and practice she came to learn about from Rauf and other Sufis; personal interview, March 9, 2007. 29.  Personal communication, March 30, 2007. 30.  Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, Marriage in Islam: A Manual (Alexandria, VA: AlSaadawi, [1972] 2000). For more on Abdul-Rauf ’s understandings of gender roles, see Kecia ‘Ali’s discussion of him in Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford Oneworld, 2006), 91–94, 179; as well as Haddad, Smith, and Moore, Muslim Women in America, 147, 178. 31.  Abdul-Rauf, “Sunnah and Hadith,” 71. 32.  Field notes, March 9, 2007. 33.  On these desires and the ways black American Muslim women negotiate them, see Rouse, Engaged Surrender. 34.  Khan, “E.R. Doctor,” 75. 35.  Personal communication, June 6, 2007. 36.  Personal interview with Keesha, May 18, 2007. 37.  For more on these differences, see Corbett, “Dhikr.” 38.  On the origin of the distinction between “drunk” and “sober” Sufism, see Jawid A. Mojaddedi, “Getting Drunk with Abu Yazid or Staying Sober with Junayd: The Creation of a Popular Typology of Sufism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 1 (2003), 1–13. 39.  Although I never heard Khan support women-led prayer, Asra Nomani, a controversial advocate of the practice, recalls Khan’s support for it; see Asra Q. Nomani, Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Muslim Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam (New York: HarperOne, 2005), 211. On Khan’s initial support and later reversal, see also Hammer, American Muslim Women, 51. 40.  Field notes, March 9, 2007.



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Chapter 7 1.  Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood, “Muslim Prayers and Renewal Near Ground Zero,” New York Times, December 9, 2009. 2.  Ingraham is quoted in Justin Elliot, “How the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Fear Mongering Began,” Salon, August 16, 2010 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://www.salon .com/2010/08/16/ground_zero_mosque_origins/ and in Bobby Ghosh, “Islamaphobia: Does America Have a Muslim Problem?,” Time, August 30, 2010 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2011936–2,00.html. 3.  Blumenthal and Mowjood, “Muslim Prayers.” 4.  Quoted in Elliot, “How the ‘Ground Zero Mosque.’” 5.  See Blumenthal and Mowjood, “Muslim Prayers” as well as Karen Zraik and Verena Dobnick, “Park51 Islamic Center Opens its Doors Near Ground Zero,” Huffington Post, September 22, 2011 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://www.huffingtonpost.com /2011/09/22/park51-islamic-center-ope_n_975585.html. 6.  Aziz Poonawalla, “Q&A with Sharif el-Gamal about Park51, NYC,” Beliefnet, July 24, 2010 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2010/07/qa-with -sharif-el-gamal-about.html#ixzz0vv08HVwp. 7.  See “About Us,” Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, accessed July 15, 2015, http://renewnyc.com/overlay/AboutUs/. 8.  See Poonawalla, “Q&A.” 9.  See Ghosh, “Islamaphobia” and John Aloysius Farrell, “Colin Powell’s Endorsement of Barack Obama and Eloquence About Anti-Muslim Bigotry in the U.S.” U.S. News and World Report online, October 20, 2008 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://www .usnews.com/opinion/blogs/john-farrell/2008/10/20/colin-powells-endorsement-of -barack-obama-and-eloquence-about-anti-muslim-bigotry-in-america. 10.  See “About Us,” National Republican Trust, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www .nationalrepublicantrust.org/about.html. 11.  Edward E. Curtis, IV, “Islam Has Long History Downtown: Why the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Belongs in Lower Manhattan,” New York Daily News online, July 23, 2010, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/islam-long-history-downtown-ground-zero -mosque-belongs-manhattan-article-1.202169#ixzz0vv1Bp0LN. 12.  On the trend among conservative politicians, see Sarah Posner, “Welcome to the Shari‘ah Conspiracy Theory Industry: How the American Right Demonizes Islam for Political Gain,” Religion Dispatches, March 8, 2011, http://www.religiondispatches.org/ archive/politics/4335/welcome_to_the_shari%27ah_conspiracy_theory_industry/. 13.  Scott Shane, “Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.,” New York Times online, July 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/us/25debate.html ?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 14.  See Elliot, “How the ‘Ground Zero Mosque.’” 15.  Matt Sledge, “Mark Williams, Tea Party Leader, Says Muslims Worship ‘Monkey God,’” Huffington Post, May 20, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/mark -williams-tea-party-l_n_582591.html. 16.  See Nicholas Confessore and Eric Lipton, “A Big Check, and Gingrich Gets a Big

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Lift,” New York Times, January 9, 2012. Adelson’s positions have not gone unchallenged in the US or in Israel; see Peter Beinart, “Sheldon Adelson’s Culture of Hate,” Ha’aretz (February 4, 2014). 17.  On local New York politicians see Rosemary R. Hicks, “Religious Pluralism, Secularism, and Interfaith Endeavors,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, edited by Juliane Hammer and Omid Safi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 156–69. On analyses of terrorist threats, see Daryl Johnson, Right-Wing Extremism: Current Political and Economic Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment (Washington, DC: US Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis, 2009). 18.  “Remarks by President George W. Bush at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” National Endowment for Democracy, November 6, 2003 (accessed October 8, 2010), http://www.ned.org/george-w-bush/remarks -by-president-george-w-bush-at-the-20th-anniversary. 19.  On violence and discrimination against Muslims across the country, see Chapter 1, n. 29 and n. 30. 20.  See Poonawalla, “Q&A.” 21.  Hicks, “Religious Pluralism,” 163. 22.  Field notes, September 10, 2010. 23.  Paul Vitello, “Amid Rift, Imam’s Role in Islam Center is Sharply Cut,” New York Times, January 14, 2011. 24.  Quoted in Poonawalla, “Q&A.” 25.  “Beyond Ground Zero,” Brian Lehrer Show, May 11, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/ story/208230-beyond-ground-zero/. 26.  See Bayrak, Memoirs, 164–216. 27.  The Sufi Circle of Long Island described such service on their website as “a form of worship—and also a powerful method of self-transformation”; see “Community Service,” Sufi Circle of Long Island, accessed April 15, 2008, http://www.suficircle.com/com munity_service.html (site discontinued). 28.  See official White House blogger Jesse Lee, “The President’s Speech in Cairo: A New Beginning,” White House, June 4, 2009 (accessed November 11, 2014), https:// www.whitehouse.gov/blog/NewBeginning/. The full text of Obama’s June 4, 2009, speech is available at White House, accessed April 29, 2016, https://www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09. 29.  Corbett, “For God and Country.” 30.  Bush clarified his aims in establishing the OFBCI at an event celebrating the Office; “President Bush Attends Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives’ National Conference,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, June 26, 2008 (accessed November 11, 2014), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases /2008/06/20080626–20.html (site discontinued). 31.  For an overview of the seven laws, passed between 1996 and 2000 and collectively known as “Charitable Choice,” that allow the US government to contract with religious service providers, see the George W. Bush administration’s White House memo,



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“Charitable Choice: the Facts,” accessed November 11, 2014, http://georgewbush -whitehouse.archives.gov/government/fbci/guidance/charitable.html. On the laws’ effects, see Sheila S. Kennedy, “Religious Philanthropies and Government Social Programs,” in Religion in Philanthropic Organizations: Family, Friend, Foe?, edited by Thomas J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2013), 144–67. 32.  See “USAID History,” USAID, accessed August 17, 2011, http://www.usaid.gov/ who-we-are/usaid-history. 33.  Corbett, “For God and Country.” 34.  Liora Danan, Mixed Blessings: U.S. Government Engagement with Religion in Conflict-Prone Settings (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007), 18–19. 35.  Historically, Catholic Relief Services (the organization under scrutiny during the Kennedy administration Peace Corps controversy) and two evangelical organizations, World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, have received far more USAID funding than any other religiously affiliated organizations. Until passage of Charitable Choice legislation, however, this required creative solutions to objections raised by Congress and members of the public. In 1962, for example, World Vision administrators established an ostensibly nonconfessional branch of operations called World Vision Relief Organization, which began contracting with USAID almost immediately. CRS and other organizations did likewise and quickly regained some of the federal funding they had enjoyed prior to the Peace Corps controversy; see David P. King, “Heartbroken for God’s World: The Story of Bob Pierce, Founder of World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse,” in Religion in Philanthropic Organizations: Family, Friend, Foe?, edited by Thomas J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 71–92 and David M. Ackerman and Vee Burke, Charitable Choice: Background and Issues (Huntington, NY: Novinka Books, 2001). 36.  “Obama Announces White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, February 5, 2009 (accessed November 11, 2014), https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/obama-announces -white-house-office-faith-based-and-neighborhood-partnerships. Patel discusses his involvement with Rauf and Khan in Acts of Faith: the Story of an American Muslim in the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (New York: Beacon, 2007), 175–177. Notably, IFYC— like Catholic and Jewish service organizations of the twentieth century—borrowed its patriotic metaphor of service from the military. Its original name was Interfaith Youth Corps; see Patel, Acts of Faith, 114. 37.  White House Office of the Press Secretary, “President Obama Unveils ‘United We Serve,’ Calls on All Americans to Commit to Meaningful Volunteer Service in Their Daily Lives,” White House, June 17, 2009 (accessed August 9, 2011), http://www.white house.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-Unveils-United-We-Serve-Calls-on-All -Americans-to-Commit-to-Meaningful-Volunteer-Service-in-Their-Daily-Lives. 38.  Barack Obama, “Ramadan Message 2009,” MuslimServe.org, accessed February 21, 2011, http://muslimamericanserve.org/ (site discontinued). 39.  Islamic Society of North America, “ISNA Newsletter,” email communication, August 21, 2009.

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40.  All quotes from MuslimServe, “A Call to Action: Join MuslimServe National Campaign for Service and Understanding on 9/11,” Islamic Circle of North America, accessed November 14, 2014, http://www.icna.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MuslimsServeCalltoAction2010.pdf. 41.  “Cordoba House – New York City,” Cordoba Initiative, last accessed July 23, 2010, http://www.cordobainitiative.org/?q=content/cordoba-house-new-york-city (site discontinued). 42.  Quoted in Poonawalla, “Q&A.” 43.  Anne Barnard, “Muslim Leaders Unite Behind Center,” New York Times, September 21, 2010. 44.  Sharif El-Gamal, “‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Will Serve All N.Y.: Developer of Site Says Sarah Palin is Welcome, Too,” New York Daily News, August 4, 2010. 45. Ibid. 46.  Hussein Rashid, “The Leadership Failure of Park51,” Religion Dispatches, August 22, 2010, http://religiondispatches.org/the-leadership-failure-of-park51/. 47.  Field notes, September 10, 2010. 48.  Nicholas Loomis, “Islamic Center: 9/11/2010,” New York Times online, September 12, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/1248069013001/islamic-center-9 -11-2010.html. 49. Nicolas Esposito, “New Yorkers Hold Candlelight Vigil in Support of Islamic Center,” Ecumenical News, September 11, 2010 (accessed July 15, 2015), http:// www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-yorkers-hold-candlelight-vigil-in-support-of -islamic-center-1169. 50.  Barnard, “Muslim Leaders Unite.” 51. Ibid. 52.  Personal interview, Daisy Khan, January 25, 2008. 53.  Blumenthal and Mowjood, “Muslim Prayers.” 54.  Vitello, “Amid Rift.” 55.  See n. 35. 56.  Kareen Faim, “Islamic Center Seeks 9/11 Recovery Grants for Lower Manhattan,” New York Times, November 22, 2010. 57.  Paul Vitello, “Planners of Mosque Considering New Project,” New York Times, March 29, 2011. 58. In 2011, the Obama administration announced that its new federal budget would cut in half community service block grants to grassroots groups in poor areas and would require those groups to compete for the remaining money. Four years later, a House subcommittee approved a spending bill that cut federal financing for the Corporation for National and Community Service—the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps and many other programs involved in the Obama administration’s United We Serve initiative; see Jackie Clams, “Some of Obama’s Favorite Programs to Face Cuts, Budget Director Says,” New York Times, February 5, 2011 and Editorial Board, “More Community Service, Not Less,” New York Times, June 19, 2015. 59.  Vitello, “Planners of Mosque.”



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60.  Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Help Stop the Downward Spiral,” Cordoba Initiative, December 7, 2010 (accessed December 21, 2010), http://www.cordobamovement.org/2010/12/ help-stop-the-downward-spiral-a-special-note-from-imam-feisal/ (site discontinued). 61.  “Beyond Ground Zero,” Brian Lehrer Show, May 11, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/ story/208230-beyond-ground-zero/. 62.  “Creating a New Vision of Islam in America,” Fresh Air, May 9, 2012, http:// www.npr.org/2012/05/09/152192549/creating-a-new-vision-of-islam-in-america. 63.  See Michael Lind, “Is Barack Obama a Socialist,” Salon, November 1, 2008, www. salon.com/2008/11/01/socialism/. Lind is the cofounder of the nonpartisan New American Foundation think tank, which is dedicated to promoting centrist politics, as Lind describes with cofounder Ted Halstead in The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (New York: Anchor, 2002). 64. Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 168. 65.  See, for example, Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Every Little Bit Helps,” Huffington Post, April 1, 2015, http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6986340, where Rauf argued that American Muslims needed to achieve the kind of freedom from discrimination that Martin Luther King, Jr., had sought (and mainly achieved, he implied) for black Americans. 66. Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 180–81, 168. 67.  See Daisy Khan, “Is the NYPD Really Against Muslims?” Huffington Post, January 27, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daisy-khan/dont-fire-nypd-commissioner -raymond-kelly_b_1236859.html. Additionally, one week after Mayor Bill deBlasio announced Kelly’s replacement and condemned both the Stop and Frisk tactics and Muslim surveillance, Khan participated in awarding Kelly a plaque for his commendable service to New York City’s Muslims; see Jamie Schram, “Muslim Community Honors Ray Kelly,” New York Post, December 10, 2013. Khan is featured in the accompanying photo next to the former police commissioner. 68.  Leaders of ISNA and ICNA also struggled, at times, to see the issues from the perspective of black American communities. In an April 30, 2015, email to their listserve (“ISNA Clarifies Baltimore Press Release”), for example, ISNA leaders—who had previously described demonstrations over the Baltimore Police killing of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man, as “riots”—apologized for focusing on protestors rather than on the police brutality, violence, and systemic racial oppression that gave rise to the protests. Meanwhile, ICNA—which also condemned the violence—held their 2015 annual convention in the city of Baltimore in the effort to “stand up for justice.” ICNA Volunteer, “Can We Roar Louder than Thunder,” email communication, May 3, 2015. 69.  Emine Saner, “Why Are Sikhs Targeted by Anti-Muslim Extremists?” Guardian online, August 8, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/08/sikhs-targeted -anti-muslim-extremists. 70.  Cordoba Initiative, “Cordoba Initiative Newsletter–June 2015,” email communication, July 9, 2015. 71. Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 162. 72. Ibid., 100. 73.  Corbett, “For God and Country.”

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74.  See Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire” and Elizabeth Shakeman Hurd, “How International Relations Got Religion and Got it Wrong,” Monkey Cage (blog), Washington Post, July 9, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/ wp/2015/07/09/how-international-relations-got-religion-and-got-it-wrong/. Importantly, Rauf has involved Muslim scholars of a wide range of perspectives and nationalities in his Shariah Index Project. Thus, while his writings may echo US State Department perspectives, his larger council—like the Shura Council Khan created through WISE—is characterized by vigorous debate over such issues and is hardly a mouthpiece for the US government. On the Shura Council, see Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, 181–82. 75.  William Dalrymple, “The Muslims in the Middle,” New York Times, August 16, 2010. 76.  “Open Phones: Lower Manhattan Residents on Park51,” Brian Lehrer Show, August 25, 2010, http://www.wnyc.org/story/92089-open-phones-lower-manhattan -residents-park51/. 77.  Daisy Khan, “REMINDER: America: The Gateway to Humanity’s Future—An Evening with Irish Mystic Lorna Byrne,” email communication, April 23, 2012. 78.  Cordoba Initiative, “Cordoba Initiative Newsletter—October, 2014,” October 30, 2014 and Naz Ahmed Georgas, Executive Director, “Qawwali and the Spiritual Alchemy of Music,” email communications, May 5, 2015. 79.  Cordoba Initiative, “Cordoba Initiative Newsletter–May 2015,” June 4, 2015 and “Cordoba Initiative Newsletter–June 2015,” email communications, July 9, 2015. 80.  Anne Barnard, “Developers of Islamic Center Try a New Strategy,” New York Times, August 1, 2011. 81. Park51 Community Center, Park51 Community Center (New York: Park51 Community Center, 2011), 8. 82.  Jillian Nannery, “Park51 Announces Grand Opening: First Major Public Event Tonight at 6:30 p.m.,” Park51 Press Release, September 21, 2011. 83.  Matt Flegenheimer, “Rent Dispute Endangers Mosque Plan,” New York Times, October 16, 2011. 84.  Patrick McGeehan, “Con Ed Sells Building Near Ground Zero Where Plans for Mosque Caused Uproar,” New York Times, August 20, 2014. 85.  Personal interview with Sajjad Chowdhry and Hanadi Doleh, February 6, 2016. 86.  The rally was organized by a former Marine who claimed to be protecting “free speech” after two Muslims from Arizona attempted to attack an anti-Islamic convention organized by Pamela Geller; see Sara Sidner and Ed Payne, “Mohammed Cartoon Contest: Protest Held Outside Phoenix Mosque,” CNN online, May 30, 2015 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/29/us/mohammed-cartoon-contest/index.html. 87.  Grynbaum, “Daisy Khan.” 88. Quoted in the Interfaith Center of New York, “ICNY Statement on the Chattanooga Shooting,” email communication, July 17, 2015. See also Frank Defrank, “Sikh Day of Service Honors Wisconsin Hate Crime Victims,” Oakland Press News, August 5, 2013, http://www.theoaklandpress.com/general-news/20130805/ sikh-day-of-service-honors-wisconsin-hate-crime-victims.



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Conclusion 1. ISNA 2014 Annual Convention Program, “Generation Rise: Elevating Muslim American Culture,” accessed November 11, 2014, http://webcache.googleusercontent. com/search?q=cache:MkwR5beJ6CEJ: www.isna.net/uploads/1/5/7/4/15744382/51_con vention_program_14_web.pdf+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a (site discontinued), page 8. Compare with page 1 of the ISNA Development Foundation’s 2013 “Sponsorship Package” pamphlet for potential corporate donors, accessed August 15, 2014, http://www.isna.net/uploads/1/5/7/4/15744382/sponsorship_booklet_csrl_2013 .pdf. 2.  “ICNA Announces its 2015 Convention Theme,” Islamic Circle of North America, February 2, 2015 (accessed July 15, 2015), http://www.icna.org/icna-announces -its-2015–convention-theme/?utm_source=ICNA&utm_campaign=31e8bcdd5a -Newsletter_93&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_00fd1cfa59–31e8bcdd5a-869045 &mc_cid=31e8bcdd5a&mc_eid=3941311693 (site discontinued). 3.  Islamic Circle of North America, “ICNA National Update: North East Storms: ICNA Relief Unveils a Broad Plan,” email communication, October 29, 2012, and Daisy Khan, “Donate to Hurricane Sandy Relief,” email communication, November 1, 2012. 4.  See Shariq A. Siddiqui, “Myth vs. Reality: Muslim American Philanthropy since 9/11,” in Religion in Philanthropic Organizations, edited by Thomas J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2013), 203–14 and Kathryn Ruff, “Scared to Donate: An Examination of the Effects of Designating Muslim Charities as Terrorist Organizations on the First Amendment Rights of Muslim Donors,” New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 23 (March 2006): 447–502. 5.  Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life Project, “How Americans Feel About Religious Groups,” Pew Research Center, July 16, 2014 (accessed November 11, 2014), http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/. 6.  Jonathan M. Katz, “Funeral For Muslims Killed in Chapel Hill Draws Thousands,” New York Times, February 12, 2015. 7.  Malise Ruthven, “Inside the Islamic State,” New York Review of Books (July 9, 2015): 74–77. 8.  Scott Shane, “Homegrown Extremists Tied to Deadlier Toll than Jihadists in U.S. Since 9/11,” New York Times, June 24, 2015. 9. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 198–234. 10.  Quoted in Frances Robles, “Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website,” New York Times (June 20, 2015). 11.  Jelani Cobb, “Terrorism in Charleston,” New Yorker (June 29, 2015): 17–18. 12.  In February 2016, for example, ISNA leaders launched a “Striving for Justice” conference tour. The first stop was Ferguson, Missouri, where Arab American social justice activist Linda Sarsour joined Imam Siraj Wahhaj to discuss, among other things, “Creating a Just Society,” “Mercy as a Tool for Uniting Communities,” and the “Role of Masjid is Promoting Social Justice.” The event ended with a “Community Service Recognition Award Ceremony” during which Wahhaj, the keynote speaker, addressed

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the issue of creating “Social Justice for Community at Large.” Event information can be found at “ISNA Conference in St. Louis,” ISNA, accessed April 29, 2016, http://www.isna .net/uploads/1/5/7/4/15744382/isnastltentativeprogram.pdf. That same year, Sarsour cofounded the multiethnic MPower Change organization to mobilize Muslims of all racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds in pursuing social justice, as well as to highlight the work of those already doing so. More about the organization can be found at https://mpowerchange.org.

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INDEX

Abdul-Rauf, Muhammad: and American Enterprise Institute, 31, 58–60, 63; Bilal Ibn Rabah: A Leading Companion of the Prophet Muhammad, 53–54; and community service, 56; criticism of US by, 61–62; and economics, 30, 31, 50, 56, 58–60, 63; on future of Muslim Americans, 62; immigration of, 42, 48; influence of, on son, 30–32, 60, 63, 134, 167–68; and intra-Muslim relations, 43, 46, 52–56; interreligious activities of, 31, 57–58, 60; and Islamic Center of Washington, DC, 31, 50, 52, 54–55, 57–58, 61–62; Marriage in Islam, 167–68; as Muslim American spokesperson, 13, 51; A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism, 31, 58–60; and Nation of Islam, 52–54, 224n33; and New York Islamic Center, 30, 52; and Sufism, 32; taken hostage, 54–55; on women’s role in Islam, 167–68 Abdur Rashid, Talib, 90–91, 121, 143, 151–52, 233n95 Abrahamic Americanness, 181 Abrahamic covenants, 169 Abrahamic ethic and tradition: Khan’s promotion of, 116; popularization of, 30, 46; Rauf ’s concept of, 1–3, 6, 8, 18, 20–21, 30, 36–38, 60, 83, 119, 216n16; Rauf ’s promotion of, 99, 109, 118 Abrahamic commonality narrative: criticisms of, 19, 21; Rauf ’s version of, 3, 6, 12, 20–22, 25, 31, 33, 46, 63–64, 68, 83, 87, 94, 99, 180, 181

Abu Ghraib prison abuses, 103, 105 Adab (etiquette; ethics), 32, 128, 145–51, 157, 244n42 Al-Adawiya, Aisha, 161, 192 Adelson, Sheldon, 185 Affirmative action, 29–30, 49–50, 56, 64, 120, 227n75 Afghanistan, 69, 100, 103, 148, 172 Albright, Madeline, 100, 110 Alger, William, 72 America At Risk (film), 18, 22 American Academy of Religion (AAR), 60 American Creed, 19–27 American dream, 25, 28, 102, 117, 228n6 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 27, 28, 31, 33, 58, 63, 76, 197, 218n59, 220n75 American Exceptionalism, 3, 7, 19, 23, 29, 117 American Petroleum Institute, 110 American Sufi Muslim Association/ American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA Society): criticism of work of, 104–106; Cordoba Initiative in relation to, 6, 71, 98–99, 110; evolution of, 6, 70–71, 88, 92, 94–96, 101, 106–16, 195–96, 198, 200; founding of, 5, 12, 70, 87, 101, 228n3; funding for, 89, 99, 107–108, 113, 150, 238n61, 238n62; growth in staff of, 106; name change for, 92, 109; programs of, 20, 70–71, 92, 93–94, 96–97, 115; purpose of, 5–6, 87–89, 97–98, 109, 114, 228n3; Sufism downplayed in programs of, 96–101, 115. See also Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT); Women’s Islamic Initiative

278

INDEX

in Spirituality and Equity/Equality (WISE) Americanization, 20, 36, 37, 42 Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (Shriners), 72 Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, 73 Annan, Kofi, 7 Anthony, Susan B., 116 Anticolonialism, 48 ‘Arabi, Ibn, 136 Arab-Israeli conflicts, 42, 48, 50, 51 Armstrong, Karen, 8, 110 Asad, Talal, 213n24, 214n25, 241n3 ASMA Society. See American Sufi Muslim Association/American Society for Muslim Advancement Aspen Institute, 95, 99, 234n6 Assimilation, 3, 13, 15, 35–37, 41–42, 97, 102, 116, 119, 197 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 73–74, 77 Ayaz, Farid, 200 Al-Azhar University, 30, 52, 60, 85, 90, 136, 145 ‘Aziz, Karim ‘Abdul, 53 Badawi, Abdullah Ahmad, 100 Baroody, William, 31, 58–59, 76 Barry, Marion, 55 Bayrak, Tosun, 78–82, 175, 187 Bell, Sean, 152 Bennett, John S., 94–95, 98–99, 110, 111, 234n6 Bilalian movement, 53–56 Bilalian News (newspaper), 53 Black American Muslims: and cultural issues, 142, 144–45; and economic factors, 63–64, 102, 119–21, 142–43; and gender issues, 168, 248n33; government relations with, 64–65, 71; marginalization of, 71, 151–52; in politics, 18; post World War II, 46–52; public perception of, 47, 55; relations with immigrant Muslims, 13, 44–46, 53–54, 66–67, 71, 130–31, 142–43, 149, 152–3; and service, 121–22, 143; and Sufism, 71–72, 90, 145–146

Black Americans: Jews and, 48; marginalization of, 3, 4, 7, 29, 42, 143, 198, 253n68; opportunities of, 117–19; black American Muslim leaders’ views on, 120–21; police killings of, 152–3, 198, 253n68; Rauf ’s views on, 64, 119–21, 198 Black Lives Matter, 152 Black Power, 30, 48 Bloomberg, Michael, 184, 186 Bradley, Thomas, 51 Brevik, Anders, 185 Breyer, Stephen, 109 Burckhardt, Titus, 75 Bush, George W., 66, 88–89, 100, 143, 164, 185, 188, 189, 194 CAIR. See Council on American-Islamic Relations Camp David Accords, 57–58 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 1, 155 Capitalism. See Democratic capitalism Carey, Lord, 155 Carnegie Corporation, 108, 238n62 Carter, Jimmy, 50, 56, 57, 82, 205 Castro, Fidel, 7, 47, 49 Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City, 77, 79–80, 90, 93–94 Catholics and Catholicism: American values and, 12, 27, 28; assimilation and acceptance of, 19, 36, 49, 86, 208; antiCatholic sentiment, 42, 188; Gingrich’s conversion to, 18, 26–27; as immigrants/ minorities, 2, 36, 39, 40, 41, 59, 116; and neoliberalism, 13, 28–29, 30, 31, 49; Protestantism and Judaism associated with, 17, 20–21, 25, 29, 47, 57, 106, 116; service practices of, 34, 42–43, 188–89; and whiteness, 29, 44 Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 188 Charity: adab and, 148–49; immigrants helped by, 35–37, 42–43; and market liberalism, 219; Rauf on, 24, 34–36, 37, 39, 42, 221n92; suspicion of Muslim contributions to, 206 Charleston, South Carolina, shooting of black worshippers, 198, 207



INDEX

Chautauqua Institution, 89, 95 Cheney, Dick, 7, 105 Chesterton, G. K., 24–27 Chittick, William, 136 Church, Forrest, 23–28, 33, 35 Civil rights, 41, 47–49, 51, 57, 64, 120, 121 Civil society, 24, 34–35 Clinton, Bill, 50, 65, 88, 100, 188, 189 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 7 Clinton Global Initiative, 100 Communism, 26, 30, 44, 59, 189, 199 Community service. See Service Congress of Racial Equality, 47 Connolly, Clara, 159 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 229n23 Corbin, Henri, 230n30 Cordoba, Spain, 1, 2, 21 Cordoba Bread Fest, 6, 94 Cordoba House/Park51: controversy over, 2–5, 13, 17–19, 22–23, 37, 92, 95, 103, 118, 122, 153, 176, 183–87, 190–92, 198, 200–202, 238n62; early approval of, 183–84; funding for, 150, 193–94, 201–2; internal conflict over, 186–96; and moderate Islam, 1–2, 122, 183–202; as multifaith institution, 186, 193; museum proposed for, 201–2; Muslim criticisms of, 191–192; and 9/11, 193; opening of, 201; plans for, 1, 22, 183, 186–187, 192–93, 195, 202–203; Rauf ’s message after, 196–200; renaming of, 2, 186; and service, 37, 122, 183, 186–95; and Sufism, 193, 199–202 Cordoba Initiative: AMSA in relation to, 6, 71, 98–99, 110; Cordoba Movement, 194, 196; evolution of, 6, 96, 107–13, 195–96; founding of, 1, 22, 71, 95, 99; funding for, 108, 194; interreligious character of, 71, 98, 109–11; as institution for combatting extremism, 25–26, 99, 110, 198; Malaysian office of, 85, 176; and moderation, 109–11; organizational structure of, 109–11; and politics, 98, 100–101, 110; programs of, 12, 20, 96, 100, 107, 111, 183, 196, 212n18, 236n32; promotion of, 6; purposes of, 1, 22, 99, 101, 110; and Sufism, 88, 91, 100, 200. See

279

also Cordoba House; Shariah Project; Shariah Index Project Corporations, 33–35, 74, 103, 105, 197 Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 109, 161, 190, 192, 238n64 Culture: as aesthetic traditions, 32, 45, 89, 93, 94, 96; American, as compatible with Islam, 9, 19, 32, 71, 76, 83, 98, 155; Muslim American understandings of, 30, 128; patriarchal, 109; role of, in Islamic practice, 38, 89, 97, 98, 114, 126, 129–35, 137–46 Daley, Richard, 51 Dalrymple, William, 199–200 Dargahs (meeting houses), 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82 Day of Seva, 202 Deak Family Foundation, 238n62 Declaration of Independence, 19, 20, 22–25, 27, 30, 70, 104, 197 Deism, 24 Democracy, Islam linked to, 1, 8, 14, 20, 22, 23, 43, 63, 91, 96, 100, 107, 109, 126–127, 144, 167, 197, 216n16 Democratic capitalism: Abdul-Rauf and, 31, 58–9; Nasr and, 76; Novak and, 27–29, 33, 218n59, 219n62, 220n90; Rauf and, 1, 6, 12, 22, 28, 30, 34, 63–64, 96, 99, 102, 109, 118–19, 120, 197–98, 212n18; values of, 59 Democratic Party and party members, 23, 29, 50, 66, 92, 100, 143, 185, 206 Dervishes: of Fariha, 87, 126, 131–33, 150, 170–73, 201; of Muzaffer, 78–80, 90; and Park51, 2, 201; performances of, 78–79, 90; relations among, 133, 135–50, 175–76, 179, 242n7; of Rauf, 8, 14, 15, 99, 103, 106, 123, 129, 133, 135–50, 176–181, 183, 186–87, 194, 201; and whirling, 78–79, 93 Dhikr (Sufi practice of remembering God), 3, 5, 8, 14, 36, 72, 77, 78, 79, 86, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 106, 115, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 157, 161, 165, 166, 170, 171, 175, 176–78, 179–80, 213n22. Dia Art Foundation, 80, 82 Diallo, Amadou, 152

280

INDEX

Egypt, 32, 42, 45, 52, 55, 136, 147, 188, 189 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty (1979), 54, 57 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 38, 44, 45 Eisenhower Doctrine, 44–45 El-Gamal, Sharif, 2, 183–84, 186–87, 190–96, 201–2 Ellison, Keith, 18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 72 Equal Rights Amendment, 162 Esposito, John, 60 Evers, Medgar, 47 Extremism: American fears of, 11–12, 65, 66, 199; associated with particular racial groups, 130, 132–33, 148; associated with Muslims involved in political activism, 100, 139, 151–52, 199; moderate Islam as opposite of, 12, 25, 100; ASMA and Cordoba proposals to combat, 22, 99–100, 198; Sufism as antidote to or opposite of, 88–89, 199–200, 233n89. See also Fundamentalism Falwell, Jerry, 25 Fard, W. D., 51 Fariha, Shaykha (Philippa de Menil): and adab, 147–50, 157; book store owned by, 131, 200; dhikrs of, 165, 170–71, 178; early life of, 79–80; followers of, 87, 126, 131– 33, 150, 170–73, 201; leadership role of, 82, 148, 165–66, 172–73; male attitudes toward, 174, 175; and Masjid al-Farah, 9, 80, 82, 150, 241n1; and service, 157, 170, 173; as successor to Muzaffer, 80–82 Al-Faruqi, Isma’il, 46, 56, 60–64, 67 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 11–12, 46, 55, 104 Federation of Islamic Associations of the US and Canada (FIA), 45 Feminism, 156, 158–63, 169, 246n11 First Gulf War, 64, 65, 67 Forbes, James, 7 Foreign policy: American concerns and interests, 28, 39, 71, 188, 200; criticisms of, 48, 56, 61, 103–5, 173; debates about role of Muslims in, 11–12; effects on American opinions of Muslims, 43, 44, 46

Foucault, Michel, 214n25 Founders, US, 21, 26, 30, 35, 60, 144, 218n57 Founding ideals and documents, US, 19–27, 70, 105 Fox News, 183, 184, 186 Frager, Robert, 78 Franklin, Benjamin, 24 Freemasonry, 72 Friedrich, Heiner, 80, 82, 87 Fundamentalism: feminist opposition to, 159–60, 246–47n14; gender as related to, 156, 162, 172; history of American ideas about, 246n13; Rauf ’s changing definition of, 6, 119, 199, 222n117, 240n95; Sufism vs., 3–4, 71, 88, 199, 212n11. See also Extremism Garrison Institute, 98 Geller, Pamela, 185, 254n86 Al-Ghazali, Muhammad ibn, 20 GI Bill, 29, 44, 49 Gingrich, Newt, 2, 6, 13, 18–19, 22–28, 34–35, 37, 184, 185, 216n8, 217n34, 218n54; A Nation Like No Other, 19, 216n7; To Save America, 18, 216n7 Giuliani, Rudolph, 184 Glazer, Nathaniel, 49 Global Fund for Women, 108 Goode, Virgil, 18 Ground Zero Mosque. See Cordoba House/ Park51 Guénon, René, 105; The Crisis of the Modern World, 75 Hafiz (Sufi poet), 72 Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi order, 77–80, 83, 106, 157, 175, 177, 213n22, 231n58 Hamilton, Alexander, 21, 24 Hanafi Muslims, 54–55 The Hate that Hate Produced (television show), 46–47 Hayek, Friedrich, 58, 226n58 Henry Luce Foundation, 108, 238n61, 238n62 Herberg, Will, 20, 21, 37–38, 41–42, 62, 89, 97, 101, 116 Hirschfield, Brad, 110



INDEX

Hixon, Lex (“Shaykh Nur”), 80–82 Homosexuality, 245n9 Homosociality, 245n9 Hostage crises: Hanafi Muslim instigators, 51, 54–55; in Iran, 4, 61, 134, 207; public perception of Muslims after, 4, 43, 50, 52, 56, 63 Hughes, Karen, 100 Human rights, 26, 48, 70, 109, 112 Hunt, Helen LaKelley, 108 Hussein, Saddam, 64–65 Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy, 75 ICNA. See Islamic Circle of North America ICNA Relief, 66 Igram, Abdallah, 45 Ijtihad (personal interpretation), 86 Immigrants: abuse of, 11, 152; acceptance of, 2–3, 6, 7, 43, 44, 116, 90, 119, 151; affluence versus poverty of, 4, 29, 93, 143, 148, 152, 153; assimilation of, 15, 35–37, 41–42, 62–63, 65–67, 97, 102, 140, 197; charity of, 35–37, 42–43; economic strategies of, 13, 49, 50, 52; racial strategies of, 2, 7, 29, 142; upward mobility of, 89, 117, 122 Ingraham, Laura, 183 Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), 66, 121–22 Interfaith Center of New York, 5 Interfaith Youth Core, 189, 36n251 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 177, 194, 201 International Monetary Fund, 62–63, 118 International Muslim Society, 45 Inter-Religious Peace Colloquium, 60 In the Spirit (radio show), 81 Inventory of U.S. Government and Private Organization Activity Regarding Islamic Organizations as an Aspect of Overseas Operations (report), 44–45 Iran, 4, 43, 47, 55, 61–62, 74–75, 76, 118, 134, 207 Iraq, 22, 64–65, 67, 100, 103, 105, 148, 172, 207 IRS. See Internal Revenue Service Islamic Center of Long Island, 85, 87, 94, 143 Islamic Center of New York, 30, 52, 94 Islamic Center of Washington, DC, 31, 45, 50, 52, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 223n8

281

Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), 66, 161, 190, 192, 198, 205, 253n68 Islamic Cultural Center, New York City, 5 Islamic Medical Association of North America, 85 Islamic Party of North America, 52 Islamic Relief, U.S.A., 66, 227n81 Islamic Social Services Associations, 161 Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), 65, 161, 189–90, 198, 205, 239n73, 253n68, 255n12 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 207 Islamic Supreme Council of America, 88 Islamophobia, 22, 113, 153, 191 ISNA. See Islamic Society of North America Israel, 26, 31, 42, 48, 54–55, 57, 65, 185, 217n34, 223n19 James, William, 72 Jefferson, Thomas, 18, 21, 24, 30 Jerrahi Order of America, 78 Jewish Community Center, 122, 184, 190 Jews and Judaism: and American immigration, 36–37; and anti-Semitism, 4; assimilation and acceptance of, 12, 41, 42, 97; and attitudes toward Israel, 48; black American relationships with, 48; as immigrants/minorities, 2, 21, 40, 42–43, 59, 65–66, 116, 206, 208; Muslim American alliances with, 56, 57, 60–61, 91, 94 103, 110, 188–189; and neoliberalism, 13, 28–29, 30, 31, 49; Protestantism and Catholicism associated with, 17, 20–21, 29, 31, 47; and service, 39, 42–43, 54, 188–189, 206, 208, 251n36; and whiteness, 29, 44 Jihad, 14, 23, 25, 60, 119, 127–128, 129, 130, 140, 145, 207, 241n6 Jitkoff, Julia A., 99 Johnson, Lyndon B., 35, 49, 50, 56, 58, 120, 219–220n75 Judeo-Christian ethic: Abrahamic commonality and, 8, 116, 197; arguments about American identity grounded in, 8, 17–18, 29, 36–37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 61, 116, 197; Islam and Muslims in relation to, 46, 59, 86, 197

282

INDEX

Judeo-Christian civilization and heritage, narrative of, 7, 8, 9, 17–19, 25, 44, 59 Jum’ah (Friday noontime prayers), 125, 127, 137, 150, 156, 165, 166, 167, 175 Kabbani, Muhammad Hisham, 88–89 Kashif, Ghayth Nur, 53 Kennedy, John F., 42, 47, 49, 188, 251n35 Khaalis, Hamaas Abdul, 55 Khan, Daisy: and Abrahamic narrative, 6, 83, 116; and ASMA, 5, 6, 12, 70–71, 87–88, 92, 93–99, 101, 105–19, 150, 196, 200, 228n3; background of, 8, 114; and Cordoba House, 2, 9, 122, 150, 181, 183–4, 186–7, 190–91, 193–95; and Cordoba Initiative, 109–110, 111, 183, 195–7; dervishes’ relations with, 174–76; dhikrs in apartment of, 8, 88, 176–77; male attitudes toward, 174–75; marriage of, 87, 178; moderate Islam promoted by, 4–7, 12, 14, 15, 122, 202; on National September 11 Memorial and Museum board, 184; and politics, 91, 96, 97–98, 101, 107, 109, 110–19, 202; and service 5, 37, 122, 187, 190–91; and Sufism, 4–5, 92, 94, 96, 115, 122, 162, 195, 200, 228n3; and women’s issues, 155–56, 158, 161, 165, 172, 174, 175, 248n39 (see also Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity/Equality) Khan, Faiz, 8, 12, 70–71, 87, 101–6, 115, 131, 136, 168–70, 176, 179, 187 Khan, Faroque, 85, 87, 143 Khan, Inayat, 72–73 Khan, Vilayat Inayat, 73, 79 Khutbahs (sermons), 61, 81, 82, 86, 103, 127, 132–33, 134, 136–37, 141, 148, 149, 150, 152, 156–57, 162, 167–69, 192 King, Chris, 99 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 7, 25, 48 King, Peter, 2, 185 Kristol, Irving, 28, 30, 219–220n75, 226n58 Lazio, Rick, 200 Lehrer, Brian, 94, 197, 200 Liberalism and liberal rights, 1, 6, 15, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39, 55, 58,

98, 100, 126–7, 129, 134, 146, 150, 155–62, 171–72, 174, 220n75, 235n14, 241n3 Liberation theology, 28 Lincoln, Abraham, 25 Lings, Martin, 75 Lived religion, 10, 214n26 LMDC. See Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Locke, John, 19, 24, 26–27, 30, 60, 219n75 Lomax, Louis, 46 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), 184, 190, 193–194 Lumumba, Patrice, 47 Luther, Martin, 20 Madoff, Bernie, 8 Mahmood, Saba, 38–39 Majlis Ash-Shura (Islamic Leadership Council) of New York, 192 Malaysia, 42, 43, 49, 62, 85, 100, 108, 111, 112, 113, 118, 176, 238n62 Malcolm X (later, El Hajj Malik el Shabazz), 25, 47–48, 55, 90, 185 Mamdani, Mahmood, 12, 243n28 Mandela, Nelson, 7 Marty, Martin, 25 Maryamiyya Sufi order, 76 Masjid al-Farah, New York City: attendance at, 125–26; communities behind, 9; conflicts in, 125–29, 176, 178–81; founding of, 77, 80; guest speakers at, 132–33; members of, 131–32, 135–38, 142–43, 148; overflow worship space for, 183; public perception of, 200; Rauf as imam of, 5, 81; Rauf ’s engagement with, 70, 81, 95, 106, 127, 175–76, 177–81; services in, 8; women’s roles and experiences in, 155–58, 161–81 Masjid al-Taqwa, Brooklyn, 65, 90, 120 Mattson, Ingrid, 161, 239n73 McCarran-Walter Act (1952), 44–45 McVeigh, Timothy, 66, 207 Menil, Dominique de, 79 Menil, John de, 79 Menil, Philippa de. See Fariha, Shaykha Meritocracy, 3–4, 7, 13, 30, 37, 57, 62 Mevlevi Sufi order, 78



INDEX

MG3 Fund, 113 Middle East: American involvement in, 44–45, 61, 100, 118, 185, 186, 228n6; and ISIS, 207; pan-Islamic movements in, 47; petro-politics of, 28; Rauf ’s plans for and thoughts about, 99, 110, 118, 199, 212n18; revolution in, 47, 61, 62, 76; rivalries in, 52 MLT. See Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow Moderate Islam: American promotion of, 11–12, 38–39, 97, 99–100; American values linked to those of, 1, 6–7, 19–20, 197; Cordoba House and, 183–202; criticisms of, 104; defining, 5–8, 128; and gender issues, 156; Khan’s promotion of, 4–7, 122; limitations of, 101–7, 122–23; and neoliberalism, 32–38; Rauf ’s promotion of, 1–8, 12, 18, 28, 89, 91–92, 109, 122, 199–200; and service, 4–5, 37, 40, 42–43, 44–46, 50, 51, 56, 57, 60, 64–67, 89, 122, 143, 146, 157–58, 183–184, 187–197, 202– 203, 205–209; stakes of, 11–12; Sufism and, 4–5, 99–100, 199–200 Modernism, 136 Mohammed/Muhammad, Elijah, 47, 49–51 Mohammed, W. D., 3, 51, 53–57, 63, 64–65, 121, 144, 224n29 Montesquieu, Charles de, 30 Moorish Science Temple, 73 Morton, James Park, 79, 90, 109 Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, 90, 143 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 74 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 49, 218n59 MPower, 255n12 Muhammad/Mohammed, Elijah, 47, 49–51 Muhammad, Prophet, 20, 21, 54, 84, 132, 155 Multiculturalism, 1, 30, 49, 138, 146, 241n3 Murdoch, Rupert, 184 Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), 121–22, 143, 161, 192 Muslim Americans: government alliances with, 44–46, 64–67, 71; criticisms of US by, 61–62, 103–4, 122, 172–73; cultural identities and practices of, 128–35, 139–46; defining, 213n21; and economic liberalism, 30–31, 50, 52, 56–58; post–World War II, 44–51; institution-

283

building among, 66; pressures on, 11, 38–40, 66, 139; public perception of, 43, 50–56, 93–94, 109, 156, 190; relations among, 51–58, 64, 66–67, 137–46; relations between immigrant and black Americans, 44–46, 66–67, 71, 130–31, 142–43, 152; and service, 37, 43, 66, 122, 143–44, 187, 189–90, 202–3, 205–6, 208; Shi’i, 126, 133–34, 137, 202; as slaves, 72; social acceptance of, 36, 43, 66, 97–98, 116, 197, 202, 206–9; Sunni, 47, 51, 52–53; surveillance, brutality, and detention experienced by (see Surveillance, brutality, and detention experienced by Muslim Americans); violence against, 198, 202, 206, 208. See also Black American Muslims; Second-generation Muslim Americans Muslim American Society, 192 Muslim Association of Canada, 161 Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT), 98, 106–7, 108, 113, 114, 189, 191, 196, 200, 236n32, 237n55 Muslim Mosque, Inc., 48, 90 MuslimServe, 189–90, 205, 208 Muslims in New York Project (Columbia University), 129, 142, 144, 147 Muslim Students’ Association, 161 Muzaffer Özak al-Jerrahi, 32, 77–83, 87, 89, 92, 132, 134, 231n53 Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order, 88 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 74–77, 81, 86, 89, 105, 111, 126, 134–37, 229n25, 230n30, 243n21 Nasr, Vali, 111 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 47 National Cathedral, Washington, DC, 57, 95 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 57 National Council of Churches, 57, 60, 107, 184 National Day of Service, 189, 205 National Defense Education Act, 45 National Geographic (magazine), 57 National Republican Trust, 184–85 National Security Administration, 11

284

INDEX

National Security Council, 38 National September 11 Memorial and Museum, 184 Nation of Islam (NOI), 3, 43, 46–55, 57, 73, 132, 141–42, 224n29, 224n30, 224n33, 225n47 Natural law, 20, 23, 24, 26–27, 218n57 Natural religion, 20 Neoconservatives, 48, 49, 50, 65, 219n75 Neoliberalism: Islamic principles compared to, 58–59; moderate Islam in relation to, 32–38; Muslim American values compared to, 50; as prevailing US ideology, 63; principles of, 27; religious minorities and, 28–32; Sufism and, 4; use of term, 218n59 Netherlands, 113 New Age spirituality, 84, 200 New Deal, 28, 29, 34, 35, 63, 219n75, 220n90 Newsweek (magazine), 91, 122 Newsweek-Washington Post (online news service), 91, 116, 118 New York Civil Liberties Union, 192 New York Daily News (newspaper), 191 New York Police Department: Stop-andFrisk tactics of, 198; surveillance program of, 11, 198, 245n58 New York Post (newspaper), 184 New York Times (newspaper), 22, 27, 47, 51, 57, 91, 143, 183, 193, 194, 199, 201 No-Fly Lists, 11 NOI. See Nation of Islam Nomani, Asra, 248n39 Novak, Michael, 27–29, 31, 33, 34, 41, 49, 58–60, 62, 63, 89, 116, 134, 197, 218n57, 218n59, 219n62, 219n63, 220n90, 226n58 Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, 81–82, 87, 88, 90, 132, 147–48, 157, 170–72, 213n22, 231n58 Obama, Barack, 7, 27, 116–18, 184, 185, 186, 188–89, 194, 197–98, 218n54, 245n9 Occupy Wall Street, 152, 197 Oil crisis (1973), 50 On Faith (blog), 91, 116, 118 Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), 44–46

The O’Reilly Factor (television show), 183 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 48 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 50 Orientalism, 4 Pagels, Elaine, 110 Pahlavi, Reza Shah, 74 Pan-Africanism, 48 Park51. See Cordoba House/Park51, 183–87, 192–195, 201–3 Pataki, George, 184 Patel, Eboo, 189 Patriotism, 54, 57, 181, 186, 190, 195, 199, 203 Patterson, David, 186 Peace Corps, 42, 43, 47, 188, 251n35 Penn, William, 24 Perennialism, 75, 86, 136–38, 229n23 Pluralism, 1, 129, 133, 138 Powell, Colin, 119, 184 Prayer Space, 191, 194 Privilege, moderation of, 145, 148–50, 152 Protestant work ethic, 3, 30, 32, 33 Al-Qadiri, Hamazah ibn ‘Abbas, 87–88 Qadiri Sufi order, 177 Qur’an: inflammatory film about, 113; motherhood as subject in, 169; for oath of office ceremony, 18; pluralism grounded in, 137, 138; rational basis of, 20; recitation of, 233n91; service grounded in, 208; threats against, 192; women’s status as reflected in, 164 Racism: Faiz Khan and, 102; immigrants’ use of, 2, 7, 15; moderate Islam in relation to, 3–4; Muslims’ views on, 120–21; Rauf ’s acknowledgment of, 198; recent incidents of, 152–53; systemic, 198, 208; in United States, 15, 142, 198, 208 Rahman, Fazlur, 136 Rak’at (cycles of prayer), 125–26 Ramadan, 65, 69, 88, 129, 143, 165, 167, 189, 192 RAND Corporation, 99–100, 199, 222n112, 234n6, Rashid, Hussein, 191



INDEX

Rauf, Feisal Abdul: and Abrahamic narrative, 1–3, 6, 8, 12, 18, 20–22, 25, 31–33, 36–38, 46, 60, 63–64, 68, 83, 87, 94, 99, 118, 119, 180, 181; American conservatives’ similarity to, 19, 23–28, 34–35; criticism of US by, 22, 122; and ASMA, 5, 12, 70–71, 87–89, 93–95, 101, 105–13; on black Americans, 64, 119–21, 198; business career of, 5, 63; and Cordoba House, 1–2, 9, 122, 150, 181, 183–87, 190–91, 193–95; and Cordoba Initiative, 1, 6, 22, 25–26, 71, 85, 95, 96–99, 107–13, 109–11, 176, 183, 194–7, 198; criticisms of, 2, 7, 9, 96, 106, 180–81, 185, 200; and democratic capitalism, 1, 6, 12, 22, 28, 30, 34, 63–64, 96, 99, 102, 109, 118–19, 120, 197–98, 212n18; development of thought of, 83–89, 92; education of, 5, 50, 63; father’s influence on, 30–32, 60, 63, 167–68; immigration of, 41; interreligious activities of, 71, 94, 98, 109–11, 185–86, 193; Islam, A Sacred Law, 84–87; Islam: A Search for Meaning, 70, 82; and Jerrahi Sufi order, 32, 81–83, 87–88, 106, 132, 157, 177; leadership experience of, 5; marriage of, 87, 178; moderate Islam promoted by, 1–8, 12, 18, 28, 89, 91–92, 109, 122, 199–200; and modernism, 136; Moving the Mountain, 162, 196–99; Nasr’s influence on, 76–77; and politics, 95–97, 100–101, 109–10, 187–88; and Qadiri Sufi order, 87–88, 177; and race relations, 49, 198; and service, 5, 37, 122, 178, 181, 187, 190–91; and Sufism, 2, 4–5, 32, 42, 63, 67–68, 70–71, 77, 81, 83–87, 90–92, 96–97, 199–200; What’s Right with Islam, 1, 4, 6, 8, 18–20, 22, 31, 60, 63, 83, 162; and women’s role in Islam, 155–56, 165–68 Reagan, Ronald, 58, 62, 63 Religious freedom, 21, 27, 28 Republican Party and party members, 2, 17, 18, 23, 26, 49, 50, 66, 92, 100, 143, 184, 185, 206, 207 Reynolds, Mike, 17–18 Right-wing militias, danger represented by, 185, 207 Riverside Church, New York City, 7–8

285

Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 108, 110 Roof, Dylann, 207 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 17, 29, 35, 44, 49, 50, 58, 188 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din, 69, 72, 78, 136, 201; Masnavi, 69, 77 Rumsfeld, Donald, 105 Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses, 159 Sacred Web (journal), 135 Said, Edward, 214n25 Santorum, Rick, 18–19 Sarsour, Linda, 255n12. Saudi Arabia, 44, 54, 64–65, 135, 140, 158, 165, 234n6, 248n28 Schuon, Frithjof, 75, 76, 137 Second-generation Muslim Americans: race consciousness of, 102–3; as Rauf ’s primary domestic audience, 63, 67, 102; and social acceptance, 44–45, 62–63 Secularism: criticisms of, 19, 22, 25, 27, 33; and gender issues, 159–60; in Iran, 74; Protestant bias of, 13, 24, 37, 222n119; pressed upon Muslim Americans, 38–39; Rauf on, 6, 22, 33, 199, 222n117; in Turkey, 73–74 September 11th (9/11): Black American Muslims after, 130–31; Cordoba House and, 193; Day of Service, 189, 205; Faiz Khan and, 101–2, 105–6; interreligious services in memory of, 7; pressures on Muslims after, 11, 38, 66, 139, 162–66; Rauf ’s message after, 1–2, 5–7, 18, 70, 93–101, 115–16 September 11th Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow, 184 September 11th National Day of Service, 205 Service: government support for, 19, 34, 49, 50, 56, 58, 121, 188–89, 206, 220n90, 251n35, 252n58; Muslim Americans and, 4–5, 40, 42–43, 44–46, 50, 51, 56, 57, 60, 64–67, 89, 122, 143–44, 146, 157–58, 183–184, 187–197, 202–203, 205–209; religious groups involved in, 19, 28, 36, 37, 39, 42–43, 56, 188–89, 251n35; Sufism and, 4–5, 15, 42, 157–58; and women’s obligations, 14–15, 158–59, 173–76

286

INDEX

Sexuality, 245n9 El Shabazz, El Hajj Malik. See X, Malcolm Shah, Muhammad Reza, 74 Shari’ah: and American culture, 6, 85; and fears of, 21, 22–23, 192; natural law synonymous with, 20–21; and Sufism, 84–86, 137, 171, 173; and US law, 1, 17, 20–23, 197 Shariah Index Project, 12, 108, 212n18, 254n74 Shariah Project, 107–8, 176, 212n18, 236n32 Shi’i tradition, 133–34, 137, 186 Shura Council, 107, 254n74 Sikh Americans, 22, 198, 202–203 Sikh Coalition, 202 Sister Fund, 108, 156 60 Minutes (television show), 122 Slave trade, 72 Socialism: criticism of 27, 28–31, 43; opposition to as a way of proving Americanness, 19, 26, 40, 43, 46, 55–64 Social welfare legislation and programs, 3, 19, 34, 36, 49, 56, 121, 220n90 Soho Properties, 183, 194–95, 201 Sojourners (magazine), 116 Southhall Black Sisters, 246n14 St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City, 6, 99, 200 Stewart, Jon, 2 Stop Islamicization of America (SIOA), 185 Strauss, Leo, 12, 219n75 Sufi Books, 131, 200 Sufi Circle of Long Island, 187 Sufi Order International, 73 Sufi Order of the West, 73 Sufism: aesthetic aspects of, 77, 78, 83, 89, 93–94; black American Muslims and, 71–72, 90; “drunk” vs. “sober,” 171; vs. extremism or fundamentalism, 3–4; government promotion of, 67–68, 71, 88–89, 99–100; as moderate Islam, 4–5, 99–100, 199–200; Muslim opposition to, 4, 32, 73–74; other Islamic practices contrasted with, 3–4, 67, 71, 73, 77; Park51 and, 201–2; principles of, 3–4, 126–27; Rauf and, 1, 2, 4–5, 32, 42, 63, 67–68, 70–71, 77, 81, 83–87, 90–92, 96–97,

199–200; service as component of, 4–5, 15, 157–58; striving as characteristic of, 32–34, 42, 60, 127–28, 136, 149–50; in United States, 71–83; West African, 72, 228n6; women’s status in, 82, 148, 155–56, 161–62 Sunni tradition, 84, 85, 126, 133–34, 216n16, 224n29, 232n72, 242n7, 243n21 Surveillance, brutality, and detention experienced by Muslim Americans, 11, 103–5, 109, 133, 152, 198, 245n58. See also Violence: against Muslims Synagogue Council, 57 Talib, Imam. See Abdur Rashid, Talib Tasawwuf (see Sufism), 5, 70, 84, 145–146, 147, 241n6, 243n22 Tawfiq, ‘Allama Al-Hajj Ahmad, 90 Tawhid (oneness), 31 Tea Party, 2, 17, 184, 185 Tekkes. See Dargahs Terrorism, 3, 22, 25, 47, 50, 59, 63, 66, 69, 71, 83, 90, 96, 101–4, 110, 114, 116, 119, 185, 189, 193, 198, 206, 207–8, 245n58, 250n17 Thatcher, Margaret, 58 Tides Foundation, 94 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 26 Tolerance, 15, 43, 61, 97, 107, 111, 122, 183, 188 Traditionalism, 75–76, 105, 135, 136 Truman, Harry, 17, 44 Tubman, Harriet, 116 Turkey, 73–74 United Nations, 26, 45, 47, 64 United We Serve, 189 University Muslim Medical Association Community Clinic, 66 Upward mobility, 3, 13, 36, 37, 44, 89, 102, 117, 122, 228n6 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 188, 251n35 US Congress, 18, 45, 49, 162, 185, 194, 251n35 US Constitution, 20, 22, 104 US Homeland Security Department, 185, 207 US State Department, 1, 2, 4, 11, 38, 55, 65, 71, 83, 88–89, 96, 99, 101, 105, 111, 136, 155, 186, 199, 228n6, 233n88, 254n74



INDEX

Vance, Cyrus, 55 Vatican II, 36, 86 Vietnam War, 41, 48–49 Violence: of Jim Crow laws, 51; against black Americans and other non-whites, 152, 208, 253n68; against Muslims, 112, 153, 198, 202, 206–7, 208; by Muslims 112, 119–120, 200, 208; in urban settings, 121 Voluntarism, 24, 28, 34, 37, 39 Wadud, Amina, 155 Wahhaj, Siraj, 65, 90, 120–21, 202, 233n93, 255n12 Walcott, Dennis, 94 Wallace, Mike, 46 Washington Post (newspaper), 57, 61 Weber, Max, 59 West African Sufis, 72, 228n6 White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, 188–89 White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 188–89 Whiteness, 3, 29–30, 90, 225n47 White supremacists, 185, 198, 207–8 Williams, Mark, 2, 185 Wilson, Woodrow, 35, 188 Winfrey, Oprah, 156 Wird (litany of names and verses), 78, 177

287

Women, 155–81; adab invoked by, 149–51; as converts to Islam, 162–64, 171–72; equality of, 14; in leadership roles, 82, 148, 155, 158, 165–66, 168, 171, 173, 248n39; liberal feminist principles, 159–62; male attitudes toward, 174–75; motherhood as role for, 158–59, 163, 167–70; 9/11’s effect on, 162–66; political context of, 172; programs for, 107–8; rights of, 112–13; roles of, 158; service expected of, 14–15, 158–59, 173–76; status of, in American culture, 162–63 Women Against Fundamentalism, 159–60, 246n14 Women in Islam, 161, 192 Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity/Equality (WISE), 107–8, 111–16, 158, 161, 165, 172, 196, 200 World Bank, 62 World Community of Al-Islam in the West, 51, 55 World Council of Churches, 60 World Economic Forum, 1, 35, 100, 155 World Trade Center bombing (1993), 66–67, 90–91 Zakat (obligatory Muslim giving), 35–37, 39, 221n103

John L. Jackson Jr., David Kyuman Kim, Editors RaceReligion publishes historical/genealogical, ethnographic and theoretical work that focuses on the complex relationship between race and religion. This series examines the paradoxical conditions under which the postcolony and empire have come to co-exist with new master narratives generated by global capitalism and contemporary notions of democracy. It seeks to uncover new ways of conceptualizing, theorizing, and understanding (any of) the following: Orientalism, nationalism, new ethnic formations, continuities and discontinuities between urban and indigenous/vernacular religions, contemporary fundamentalisms, questions of agency, mourning rituals, political/social mobilizations, diasporic/exilic subjectivities, and the work of memory in the reconstitution of tradition. The series also bridges theoretical concerns with the lived experiences of individuals and their communities. Rather than presuming race and religion as transparent categories, books in the series showcase their unexpected conjunctions, revealing new understandings of what it means to live race and religion, to do race and religion, in the contemporary world. By highlighting modern confluences of these two terms, they trouble conventional thinking about secularism, political rationality, and the lived realities of modern life. Marla Frederick, Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global